Former UFC Middleweight Champion Chris Weidman hasn’t been seen in action since defeating Kelvin Gastelum in the main event of UFC On Fox 25.
The New York native says that surgery to repair a torn ligament has lead to repercussions that have kept him out of action.
“After the fight, I ended up going to the doctor and I found that I needed to get surgery, so I got the surgery,” Weidman said on The MMA Hour. “They took a tendon out of my wrist and used that to create a new ligament from my thumb. And they told me it was going to be kind of a quick recovery. It ended up being eight months until I realized that, I guess, during the trauma of the surgery, the bones — when they drilled through the bones, it’s a very one-in-a-million chance, the blood supply didn’t come back to the bones, so the bones were like falling apart. They crushed all the cartilage between the joint, and it was pretty painful for the last eight months as I was trying to train and get through it.”
Weidman has missed almost a year of action twice before during his UFC tenure, with those breaks happening from July 2012 to July 2013 and July 2014 to May 2015.
Even Weidman’s surgeon couldn’t believe just how rare the medical issue was that Weidman suffered after the ligament surgery.
“The fact that I was out as long as I was is insane, and the chance of that ever happening is extremely, extremely small, like I said,” Weidman said. “The surgeons I went to, even for second opinions, they said they’d never seen it before as a doctor, so I got unlucky. And it’s feeling great. I’m very positive and I’ll be back and better than ever.”
There is still no word yet on when Weidman could return to action, but the fighter would like to be back by the end of the year.
