Damn. A few days ago Alan Belcher tweeted that he had to cut his trip to Brazil short due to unexpected vision lost in his right eye. The day after he arrived in America, Belcher had an emergency surgery on his detached retina and in this interview with PureFights, Alan has permanent vision damage which may threaten his MMA career.
"I have a detached retina, just lost the vision in my right eye all of a sudden. Just happened all of a sudden man, pretty much over night. I was in Brazil training, I messed around there for a few days and then afterward I had to come home and have a surgery the day after I came home.
I think it happened in training but I don't know exactly when. It might of been from the pressure of the airplane that might have finished it off, but before that I probably had some tears [as in rips] in my retina and it was just from getting hit in the head probably.
A few weeks before I noticed some flashing, kind of seeing stars when I closed my eyes. I didn't really know what that was so I should have got it checked out then but I didn't really think about it until I stated losing my vision. Oh well.
It's going to take a couple months to heal and be at its peak, then I'll know how good my vision comes back. I lost a lot of my peripheral vision and I got that back right away after the surgery, but everything is blurry and distorted pretty much the same as everything was before the surgery. I guess my sight should be getting better...[the doctor] says it's definitely not going to get back to the same but at best it's going to be something like 20/40, 20/60 vision. I'm going to be really near-sighted. I can't see anything far away and when it gets close I can almost see it.
There's going to be more surgeries even at the best case scenario. Worst case scenario is I don't get any better than this, I'm only working with one eye, I probably don't want to risk fighting again because if I lose that one I'm going to be blind."
'Damn' is all anyone can really say. Guys like Belcher literally place their health on the line so that we can be entertained on our sofas on a Saturday night. It's an incredible sacrifice just for us to drop another $49.95 on our cable bill statement. Get better Alan Belcher.