Nine days after his main event in Auckland, New Zealand, Paul Felder joined Ariel Helwani’s MMA Show, where he announced that he was diagnosed with rhabdomyolysis, also known as rhabdo, after being sent to the emergency room to tend to other injuries that he recieved during the fight.
Rhabdo occurs when a persons muscle fibers are dieing due to a direct or indirect muscle injury, and they get released into the bloodstream, causing urine to turn to a dark brown color.
“It’s been a good recovery,” said Felder. “Obviously I had to stay in Auckland for a few extra days to have my eye looked at, you know there were a couple little fractures in my orbital (bone) and they always wanna be safe before they send you off flying 20 hours – 20 plus hours, whatever it is to get back to Philadelphia,” he added. “My leg is still really sore but that’s the swelling, it’s healing up there, and um, the other crazy thing is I ended up getting rhabdo from that fight. It’s a condition where your muscles begin to actually break down and leak into your blood stream, producing I think more myoglobin and it wears on your kidneys and it turns your urine basically coca-cola color.”
This isn’t the first time Felder has been diagnosed with this condition after a fight, stating during the interview that he’s gotten rhabdo twice before.
Luckily for Felder, the condition was addressed while he was in the hospital where they were able to tend to it immediately. He’s already gotten rid of the condition, and he is now on the path to making a full recovery.
“It’s pretty quick. They basically just flush your system, flush your kidneys. Uh, so they gave me like five – five bags of IV all of course administered by the hospital and under their watchful eye, so USADA knows what’s going on.”
Felders fighting future still remains in question as he stated in his post-fight interview that that may have been it for him as far as fighting in the UFC goes.
However, Felder still plans to call fights as an ESPN analyst for UFC fight cards.
