Issue 180

July 2019

In the aftermath of his defeat by Jeremy Stephens, Josh Emmett suffered injuries so severe he stopped breathing. Twice. Now on the comeback trail, his gaze is fixed on UFC gold like never before.

Very few fighters make it through their career in Mixed Martial Arts without sustaining a serious injury, but not many will have ever been through an experience like the one UFC featherweight Josh Emmett endured in 2018.

Riding high off the back of consecutive wins against Felipe Arantes and Ricardo Lamas, Emmett accepted a fight with the heavy-hitting Jeremy Stephens in February 2018. Little did he know at the time, but it turned out to be his one and only outing in the UFC Octagon that year.

Emmett started the fight well and looked to be in control of the contest after dropping Stephens in the opening exchanges. The momentum of the fight turned though in the second round when Stephens landed a wild left hook and followed up with a series of devastating elbows and a questionable knee to the face that rendered Emmett unconscious.

The end of the fight was somewhat controversial given the dispute over whether the knee strike was legal or not, but the result of the fight would later pale in significance given what came to light after it.

Emmett revealed how things went from bad to worse once he had been transported to the local medical facility in Florida.

Medical misdiagnosis

“It was one of the toughest years of my fighting career,” Emmett said. “When I went to the hospital in Florida, they misdiagnosed me. They thought I just had a fracture in my orbital and that was it. I think they just missed a lot of the things on my CT scan. 

“To be honest, I just don’t even remember going there,” he continued. “All I remember is going into the second round of the fight and then the next thing I know I’m in my coach’s hotel room with my wife. We normally get an Airbnb so to wake up in this pitch-black dark room was crazy. I didn’t know where the hell I was.”

The misdiagnosis was only the start of Emmett’s issues. The doctors in Florida made a dangerous mistake when treating him and it was only later on that he realised the true severity of their negligence.

“I was in a ton of pain whilst I was at the hospital and I’ve got a really high pain tolerance, so it must’ve been really bad,” Emmett said. “I must’ve kept telling them how much pain I was in, that’s what my wife and coach told me anyway. The doctors there kept giving me something called Dilaudid and you should have only one dose every like six or eight hours. Well, they gave me a whole day’s worth of Dilaudid in just two hours.

“According to some of the therapists and doctors that I told afterward, they said I was lucky that I didn’t die and I guess I nearly did,” he continued. “My heart rate just kept dropping and I stopped breathing. All the monitors kept going off and my wife and my coach had to get the doctors rushing back in my room. They then shook me until I came back to. It happened twice. It’s crazy to even think about.”

After being discharged from the hospital in Florida, the wider extent of Emmett’s injuries began to come to light. Simple tasks such as speaking were still difficult and it was his mouth that would next need immediate medical attention. 

“When I woke up in the morning back in the hotel room, I was still in so much pain,” Emmett recalled. “My teeth were displaced and I couldn’t shut my teeth all the way so I talked to the UFC staff and they got me an emergency endodontist appointment. I was supposed to be staying in Florida with my family after and going to Disneyland, but instead, I had to get my teeth sorted out. He did three emergency root canals on my front teeth and he had to do this crazy maneuver whilst I was sat in the chair. He literally put his foot up on the footrest, cupped my front teeth while he stood behind me and then pulled my teeth back into the gums.”

Just 24 hours later, Emmett flew back home to Sacramento, California and it was only then that he received the full medical attention that he actually required.

CT trauma

“The next day we then flew back home, but things still weren’t quite right,” Emmett said. “I could tell my wife was still really stressed and my friends and family were too. She talked to her boss, who’s actually my doctor and told him I still wasn’t right and he said that I should go to the hospital right away. We then went to the hospital in Sacramento and they tried to get all the documents and scans from the hospital in Florida, but they refused so they had to do the tests again themselves. They did another CT scan and they couldn’t believe what they saw. They told me that I needed emergency surgery and that they’d called me an ambulance to go get it done right away.”

A team of specialists was awaiting Emmett’s arrival in the ambulance and he was quickly rushed into the theater upon his arrival. The doctors were astounded by what they found and went as far as saying Emmett was fortunate to not have sustained even more serious damage given the nature of the trauma.

“In the scan that they did they saw that my orbital was completely broken, the orbital floor was completely shattered, and the bone on the side on my face, the Zygomatic arch, that was also broken,” Emmett said. “My left cheek was completely broken and caved in and the major nerve on the side of my face that controlled my eye was also a mess.

“When I got to the hospital where I was having the emergency surgery the doctors just kept telling me how lucky I was,” he continued. “They couldn’t believe that I could do things like move my eye around. They were amazed because there was literally nothing holding my eyeball in the socket. Normally with injuries like these, the eye would just fall out or get punctured by one of the broken bones around it. They kept telling me how lucky I was because I was still able to move my eye; I certainly didn’t feel lucky at the time.”

The immediate physical wounds Emmett sustained were of a very serious nature, but little did he know they were going to be the least of his problems. The difficulties that followed after his surgery were worse than anything he’d ever experienced before and something he said he would never even wish upon his worst enemy.

Vertigo

“Thankfully the surgery went pretty well,” Emmett said. “They popped my cheek back out and put in a big L-shaped bracket going from the top of my lip, up to my cheek. They fixed the orbital and the Zygomatic arch and fixed all of the things going on in my nose. I was in the hospital for a little while and then got let out on my thirty-third birthday. It was a crazy time man. When I got home that’s when the next phase of things happened and that’s when I started experiencing all this vertigo.

“I’ve never had vertigo before,” he continued. “Honestly, it’s one of the worst things ever and I wouldn’t wish it upon anyone. I don’t understand how people can live with it for their whole lives. I had super it bad for two months and it affected everything. Getting up and going to bed was the worst. The best way to describe it would be to imagine you’re like on this tiny boat in the middle of the ocean during the worst storm. The ground is like moving and the room is spinning like you’re on a carnival ride. It makes you feel nauseous and sick to your stomach. I knew all my bones would heal, but the vertigo was something else. Just the smallest amount of movement would make me feel sick.”

Repair and recovery

The realization of the dangers of MMA had never been closer to home, though Emmett never for a second considered calling time on his career. In his mind, MMA was the fastest way for him to secure the future that he desired for his family and his return to the Octagon was only ever a matter of time.

“Deep down inside, I always believed I would get better and my passion for fighting never left me at any point,” Emmett said. “That said, I knew I had to take my time coming back from this because I knew it was a really bad concussion and I’ve seen friends and teammates try to come back too soon and they’ve never been the same.

“I’ll be honest, I want to build a legacy and achieve great things in the sport, but at the end of the day I fight for the money,” he continued. “There’s no quicker way that I can get these chunks of change as quickly, but it did hurt that I got only half my paycheck from that one fight in 2018 because I lost. That made life very tough and to be honest, it wasn’t like I was getting paid a decent amount of money anyway.”

For someone usually so active, sitting on the sidelines took a lot of getting used to, but Emmett didn’t just sit around licking his wounds. Instead, he used to time to achieve another lifelong ambition working with his doctor who was aiding his recovery.

“I had to do a few side jobs to get through the 13 months that I had off, but one of the main things I did was create my own supplement with the help of my good friend Dr. Ban Truong, he’s a brilliant man,” Emmett said. “I’d always wanted to have my supplement line, things like amino acids, proteins etc. but with the injuries I had, there weren’t a lot of supplements out there that could help me.

“We created a supplement that helped with all the symptoms I was having and something that would help other combat sports athletes as well,” he continued. “The supplement we created was called ‘Mastermind’ and I took it for three to four months before I made my return and I credit a lot of how good I felt to that. Focusing on that when I couldn’t train or workout really kept me going.”

Premature comeback

Emmett’s physical recovery came in stages and there were plenty of setbacks along the way. His first step back into a competitive environment came just four months after he sustained his injuries and it proved to be too much, too soon.

“The first time I did something physical was June 30 when I did in a grappling match in Moscow, Russia,” Emmett said. “I got a text from a promoter like three weeks before and the money there were offering was just too much to turn down. Having not been paid since February and needing a down payment on a new house, I knew I had to do it. I drilled really light with my coach at the start of June, but we never went live or did anything. After the match itself, all the concussive symptoms came back and everyone around me could tell that I was feeling right again. I had the worst headache and was feeling dizzy again.”

Following this minor setback, Emmett took a much slower approach to his recovery and it wasn’t until much later in the year that he introduced any type of physical contact back into his training. Being the team player that he is, Emmett returned to sparring to aid his teammate Chad Mendes prepare for his fight at UFC 229.

“After that, it took me another good few months to get back in the gym,” Emmett said. “I started hitting pads again in like August, but it was only really light work and I didn’t really do anything physical until five weeks before Chad’s fight with Volkanovski in December. Everything was fine and I was sparring him, getting hit in the face and I could tell everything was fixed because Chad hits hard and I wasn’t suffering any pain where my injuries had been healing. I did get one random bout of vertigo shortly afterward, but I worked with a therapist and knock on wood I’ve not had one since.”

Back in the Octagon

Emmett’s return to the Octagon came on UFC on ESPN 2 when he took on Michael Johnson. Despite being out of action for 399 days, Emmett reminded the world of his skills and knocked Johnson out with a beautiful overhand right in the second round. For someone who had been so brutally injured in his last fight, Emmett showed zero signs of any ill effects from his time away from the Octagon.  

“It felt amazing to be back,” Emmett said. “Just being around during fight week was incredible and when that cage door closed I was ready to do absolutely anything to get my hand raised. Watching the fight back, the commentators were saying how I was going to be hesitant because of the fractures, but that didn’t cross my mind for a second when I was in there. I was well prepared for this fight and I knew that my injuries heading in there wasn’t going to be a problem. I think my mental strength is one of my best attributes and I know going in there that no one is ever going to be able to break me.

“Everything went according to plan,” he continued. “I knew how dangerous Michael Johnson was, but I knew if I landed clean with my right hand I could finish the fight. I just stayed on the outside and kept changing levels to keep him thinking about it. I was actually trying to get takedowns, I just wanted him to have that in the back of his mind. He did well keeping his distance in the first two rounds, but in the third, he got too close to me and that right hand was right on the money. It felt amazing.”

Though his return to action was successful, Emmett still hasn’t made a full recovery from the injuries he suffered at the hands of Stephens. The Team Alpha Male fighter continues to work with medical experts to make further advancements in his rehabilitation and he considers himself lucky to have been able to access them.

“I do have a few lasting injuries,” Emmett said. “The nerve that was compressed in the side of my face, some feeling has come back, but I still have a large area in the left side of my face, like the nose, cheek and left side of my gums, they’re all still completely numb. I can scratch the left side of my gums and I can’t feel a thing. That’s some of the only stuff that still lingers, but for the most part, I made a full recovery.

“I worked with a ton of therapists to make sure I could get back to full health and I was just very lucky that I have a network of people that I have. Not everyone in the UFC has these types of connections and resources available to them. I don’t know where I would be had I not had these people around me.”

Having returned to winning ways in March, Emmett now has his eyes on making another run at the UFC featherweight title. Ranked at number eight in the division, it would arguably take just a few more wins before getting his first-ever shot at UFC gold and making a miraculous return from a devastating injury.

“I want to be as active as possible for the rest of the year,” Emmett said. “I feel like I lost so much time being on the sidelines. I was probably just one win away from a title fight, so I need to build myself back up there. I wanted to fight on the July 6 card, but I think that’s full now. The Sacramento card they just announced is perfect for me. Hopefully, I fight on that one, but I’ll be taking things just one fight at a time this year. Fighting three or four times would be great, but we will see how things pan out. I’m going to make up for lost time.”