Former UFC women’s bantamweight champion, Ronda Rousey, told her social media followers that her “secret” concussion history — not knockout losses to Holly Holm and Amanda Nunes — forced her to retire from combat sports. In fact, it got so bad at one point that even jabs were leaving “Rowdy” with concussion symptoms.
Not surprisingly, those comments resurfaced after Rousey booked her MMA comeback fight against former Strikeforce attraction Gina Carano, a Netflix headliner set for May 16 in Los Angeles. Rousey and Carano will undergo “extensive” pre-fight testing to ensure both combatants are medically fit to compete.
The 39 year-old Rousey is already one step ahead, thanks to UFC bestie Dana White and Cleveland Clinic.
“We’ve never been able to figure out what’s going on with me and basically from lighter and lighter hits I’m getting concussion symptoms,” Rousey told Jim Rome (via MMA Fighting). “I lose big chunks of my vision, my depth perception and ability to think clearly. Dr. [Charles] Bernick at the Cleveland Clinic said, ‘I’ve listened to all of your symptoms, I’ve looked at all of your scans, your brain looks great.’”
UFC is a significant financial supporter of Cleveland Clinic.
“I was telling him about my history and as a kid I would get migraines all the time and epilepsy runs in my family,” Rousey explained. “Every generation of my family, someone’s had epilepsy and there’s some sort of link between epilepsy and migraines. He was saying that people that get migraines are more susceptible to getting concussions, and the more concussions I get, the easier it is to get a migraine.”
And migraines can cause a fast fighter to have a slow start.
“What he thinks is happening is that I’m not actually getting a concussion every single time that this is happening,” Rousey added. “He thinks it’s setting off what’s called migraine aura where you just lose big chunks of your vision and it’s called cortical spreading depression. Where I guess your neurons get overly excited and depolarize and shut down in a wave and that’s why I lose chunks of my vision when I’m getting hit.”
No doubt this current champ is sympathetic to her cause.
“To me I was like, ‘I’m not dying! CTE isn’t coming to get me!‘ There’s actually stuff we can do about it,” Rousey said. “At first we couldn’t find any preventative migraine medication, it’s usually stuff to be used after the fact. Just recently we’ve been able to find something that I can take that’s preventative that will hopefully be able to resolve this issue for me. It’s life changing.”
So is her Netflix payday — but I’m sure the two are unrelated.
But at least her migraines are under control.
