After Alex Volkanovski beat Jose Aldo at UFC 237 he was riding high on emotions. However, one his way home from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, he felt under the weather and his foot started to swell.
Soon thereafter, the swelling did not go down which then hospitalized the featherweight. And, the Aussie says he was close to losing his leg if he didn’t go to the hospital when he did.
“I guess it was too hard to tell because I was injured because of the trauma from the kicks, and that sort of threw me off,” Volkanovski said to ESPN. “But once I went on the plane it went crazy and obviously I just started feeling really crook [sick]. Then I went on the next flight and that’s when it really hit me; I had 40+ degree temperatures, it was nasty stuff. I was delirious by then and didn’t really know what was going on, but I was like ‘get me a doctor, I need a doctor’. So they did that and, yeah, it was pretty serious, the antibiotics didn’t work straight away; we were really worried about it hitting my tendons and bones because it was very close, once it does that you can have problems.
“So we were pretty lucky the plane stopped in Chile rather than if I’d got on the next flight. Within a couple of hours I would have had to tell them we’ve got to turn this flight around, and by then the damage would have been done and I could have lost the leg, lose your life. That stuff’s very, very serious, but it didn’t get to that stage. We got it just at the right time; we left it too long where it rocked me so much, but we got in just in time for it not to do serious damage.”
Ultimately, Volkanovski ended up being fine and is now back home resting.
