In April 2021, Chris Weidman suffered arguably the worst injury in UFC history Over the next two years, Stephania Bell and E60 …
uh I was pretty scared um about this pain I you know because I was I’m I’m thinking about the worst case scenarios worst case scenario is that the blood supply doesn’t come back to my bone and it doesn’t take which would mean possible amputation the other thing is that I have numbness on the bottom of my feet feet and uh few of my toes um it’s like tingling like they’re like they’re sleeping so I don’t have full um control or I just you know the nerve isn’t fully back in that with that so that’s a little scary as well dat line Jacksonville Florida it is the night of all nights for the Combat Sports leader this is UFC 261 by April 2021 former UFC middleweight champion Chris widman was looking to get back on track after losing five of his last seven fights at 36 he looked to turn back the clock against the man he defeated for his first professional title yuah Hall I could tell you the people at were around when we were warming up were totally Blown Away by him they said he looked great he had a great Camp I believe that fight was going to really escalate to just a fantastic fight presenting the former UFC middleweight champion the All American c one I was very focused I was ready to like the division on fire I felt great familiar foes here blue trunks for wman black trunks for yah Hall ready I never really threw cap kicks people have had a lot of success with below the knee kicks I did not care as long as I was below that knee I’m kicking as hard as I can and so 17 seconds in that fight [Applause] oh my God oh my God when I kick him it created this loud sound it really sounded like a baseball bat almost with immediacy we all reflected back to the Anderson Silva Chris wadman fight and thought to ourselves can you believe that that happened against him with Anderson and then this happens to him now I can’t ever remember being so shook in a broadcast booth in my life chman has s his left leg oh no oh my God oh my God oh my God just awful I screwed up the call I said Chris widman has snapped his left leg and he snapped his right leg so I think that sort of underscores for you just how shook I was in the moment I go back and I see vaguely my leg split in half and I’m like what the there’s no way that’s my leg and then all of a sudden the pain starts coming I couldn’t believe it the paramedics come in they’re trying to move my leg around and I feel the bone and I see the bone sticking out the leg and I’m like oh my God please just get me paying pillows that’s a bad injury that takes a long time to recover from if you ever come back from it could be over you just felt the energy you leave the room I had my head down cuz again I don’t watch it and I could just feel everybody still I’m up in the stands it took me about 20 minutes of anxiety trying to get down we got there as he was being pushed off into the ambulance Chris was taken by ambulance to University of Florida health where his family was waiting for him we had no idea like were they going to amputate his leg was it going to be fine and you know they does he need surgery we didn’t know for hours what was going to happen cuz it’s the emergency [Music] room I’m in the hospital and my leg is still all over the place they were feeling the pulse on my leg if I was even if I had a pulse if they’re going to have to cut my leg off like I just wanted to make sure they don’t just cut my leg off Chris had a tibia fracture um at the junction of the middle and distal third it’s actually a tough area to heal he had an open fibular fracture as well which meant that when when his leg broke that bone came out of the skin so it damaged you know nerves damages small blood vessels it damages muscle on the way out he had a titanium rod put down the middle of the bone that stabilized the bone and allowed him to put weight on it and lined it up perfectly [Music] what’s going on guys I heard all love and support I’m getting I haven’t really been able to be on my phone too much pain is pretty bad what I’m looking like now at the time Chris was only our third um compound fracture that occurred in the UFC which is crazy I mean we have been here for 30 years now as a sport and to only have three come through tells you the uniqueness a compound tip FIB fracture for our athletes is the most catastrophic injury hands down that they experience why is that so not only are these athletes you know very mobile they are moving around all the time um but these athletes also you know don’t rest don’t take the time for those fractures to heal I am going to get to leave this hospital in Jacksonville Florida uh today I’m excited to get back home and get in my own bed um and continue with recovery okay I got it on April 27th 2021 3 days after the injury Chris and his family traveled back home which was now in Fort Mill South Carolina about 25 minutes from Charlotte I just took this off my toes still feel weird they still feel tingly you got incisions so what happened after you got back how did your recovery progress um it was very very bad very painful there was no guarantees I was going to be able to come back man I I I didn’t know if I was going to be able to walk the right way again you know or at all Chris began the slow process of Rehabilitation spending his initial month posts surgery trying to make his leg functional again even that proved agonizing he started noticing things in his legs that he was like well I don’t know if this is normal or you know if I need another surgery I was like I think I’m good I have to get through this pain and I realized that the we like I felt like these clicking this clicking inside my the side of my leg and I didn’t know if it was normal but it was very painful he had a chip of bone in the front of his shin that was normal um that happens whenever you have a bad fracture and we remove that piece the main thing that we did in his surgery was treat what’s called a fibula nonunion and what that means is the fibula bone did not heal and so for him what we had to do is go in and put plates and screws along that actually put two plates and screws along it to get a very very solid fixation to get that to heal over 9 months and two surgeries Chris slowly regained the use of his leg and an idea began to take shape I did start kind of contemplating for the first time of like all right what does my life look like without being a fighter but I still have like that competitive desire in me I I just didn’t feel like I was done when Chris told me he was going to fight it really wasn’t like I’m going to fight it was just obvious I have mixed emotions for sure I don’t want him to be hurt anymore at the same time to go through all that and still be so passionate about something I feel like is a blessing saying there’s lots of things that make these Fighters very unique human beings very few people can do what they do they’re wired differently than all other human beings are these people can’t sit and bumper to- bumper traffic every day and go to a 9 to-5 job and and live the way that we live no one can ever take away what this man has accomplished but the visual of that broken leg was just not the way Chris wiman’s career was going to end and surprising people baby you don’t know yet you’ll see this one day this is the main area um that I’m concerned about um as especially because it seems still be limiting you um you said you had another recent setback just I mean so it happened that one time I was doing one arm push-ups on a medicine ball and I was you know on my toes and I guess you know obviously one this foot probably took more weight than the other one and I like and when I went down or it’s probably on this end it went down like it just immediately hurt and I was like hardly walking I feel like it was getting better and I think it is getting better just like there still something going on there I get back out starting to feel optim Mystic again and I’m like man my leg’s killing me you know I’m getting this pain on this side of my leg this time and I don’t know what it’s from maybe it’s the screws that are going into the tibia bone from the rod you know you can feel them like coming through the skin Chris elected to have the screws removed the third surgery on his right leg hoping this would solve his discomfort I’m starting to feel optimistic again but then I’m having pain on the side of my fibula bone where the plates are in so I’m like like what’s going on even as thin as we put these plates you know as low profile as they can be they still can be irritating and so all those layers Scar together the skin was scarred to the muscle the muscle scarred to the nerve and all that scar to the bone that was trying to heal and so when we went back to take out as Hardware one of the things we did was decompress that nerve so release the scar tissue from around that nerve the surgery to remove the remaining Hardware from his leg would be his fourth and last procedure that didn’t mean Chris was out of the woods this is the challenge with an injury that’s bad enough that requires multible surgeries and so there’s a certain risk for having a wound complication gosh and so after we took out the hardware he ended up having a a wound infection my leg was down to like a scab and I got staff of infection somehow got in there or when the surgery happened I don’t really don’t know how long I had the infection for but out of nowhere it got really painful my foot blew up my the pain I had in my leg was really bad that was not fun that was about I don’t know two months of me stuffing gauze down inside my leg down to the bone after all this why is it so important for you to return because how about the the challenge in the story that just excites me I love when people are counting me out