UFC women’s flyweight contender Paige VanZant looks to have a long road towards an MMA return.
Despite winning her last fight over Rachael Ostovich in January, VanZant remains on the sidelines. She recently posted some gruesome photographs of an arm surgery, and things were not pretty. The operation was just the latest in a long series of such procedures. ’12 Gauge’ was hardly cleared for her fight against Ostovich.
VanZant appeared on today’s ‘Ariel Helwani’s MMA Show’ to discuss her recovery. During the first real day she was allowed to leave her house, VanZant detailed the days immediately following the third arm surgery:
“I’m feeling good. I’m all casted up. It’s the first day where I was allowed out of the house. For the first four days, I had to have my arm elevated 20 out of 24 hours a day. So I had to like, sit on the couch for 20 hours a day. I was going absolutely insane. So this is the day I got to get out of the house.”
“So I’m about four or five days out of surgery I would say. You know, surgery no. 3, it’s been rough. This one has actually gone well, I will say I have an extremely positive mindset about it. Been here, I’ve done it before. The surgery was amazing, everything has been the smoothest with this surgery so far, so I’m actually feeling good.”
Latest Injury
VanZant then dove into detail about her timeline of arm injuries and how her latest arm break went down. The description sounded quite gruesome, which explains her recent photo.
‘Yeah, so everything went fine with my first break, like where I broke my arm the first time. So I broke it the first time, had surgery, surgery failed, broke it again, you know, had surgery the second time. This one, I fought, beat Rachael Ostovich, was sparring the week after and I fractured a completely different spot in my arm. I fractured around the plate. Which happens, I guess. And yeah, it sucks. And I went a month or so before I even got the results back.
“I knew it was fractured. Unfortunately, it didn’t heal correctly. They thought it was going to heal, you know, the way a normal bone should. But because I wasn’t csted, there was too uch movement at the fracture site. So I got like a hyperplasia non-union, something like that. And that’s yeah, where we are now. Third surgery, all on the same arm, two on the same spot and then one in a different spot, so this is the third plate I have in my arm.”
Reason For Those Photos
It appears a daunting recovery for the multimedia starlet, who probably wouldn’t have to fight if she didn’t want to. Due to her fervent commitment to recovering from these surgeries, however, it’s clear she’s a true fighter.
And that’s why she wanted to post the photograph of the surgery. It’s not just a broken arm. Yet she pointed out things could also be much worse in terms of fight-caused ailments:
“Feeling good though. The reason I post all those, like, nasty pictures of my arm on Instagram is I wanted people to see, like, it’s not just a broken arm. I’m going in to have my arm basically reconstructed. And then is the third time I’ve gone through this whole process. And it’s like a legit injury, it’s not like an easy, just put-a-cast-on-it and fix-it thing. I’ve had extreme trauma to my arm.
“But at the same time, it is just an arm. I’m so thankful, I didn’t, like Sage Northcutt and fracture his entire face. This is just an arm. I’ve been here before. I’ve gone through the healing process before and I’m going to be back right back at it.
Finally, VanZant offered a timeline on her recovery. She said she would be back to full training sooner than you might think:
“The surgeon said I should be back training a hundred percent in 12 weeks.”
