UFC vet Chris Leben was on his way back to MMA when he got the bad news, an over-sized left ventricle makes him a prime candidate for heart failure.
Living the MMA lifestyle is hard on your body. All the hours of training, piled on top of hours of hard sparring and grueling weight cuts, not to mention the actual fighting itself. You do it long enough and you’re almost certainly going to wind up with some health complications. Do it while also living a hard lifestyle with a lot of drug and alcohol use? You might just end up dead, or very nearly.
That’s the prospect that UFC and Ultimate Fighter 1 veteran Chris Leben faces, as he described the discovery that led to his MMA return being shelved to MMAFighting.com:
“Basically, I was doing my pre-fight stuff. I failed the EKG, so I took four more, continued to fail as my left ventricle was putting out too much electricity. They did a cardio-ecogram where they went in and actually look. They do an ultrasound of your heart while it’s pumping.
“Unfortunately, my left ventricle is oversized, misshapen and not pumping correctly. It’s pumping at 18 percent, which I’m told is not a good thing.”
As to what exactly might be behind Leben’s condition, he went into a number of reasons, including a rehab drug he was taking called Suboxone. But mostly, the fighter attributed his condition to a combination of a lot of hard work and a lot of hard living:
“They’re not saying it’s linked to alcohol or anything like that, but my guess is I train my ass off when I’m in the gym. I never miss a day in the gym, but for a long time, I also took advantage of the night life as well. So, I’m kinda burning the candle from both ends for years. I think my heart just couldn’t take it.”
As for the future, apparently several doctors have told Leben that he may need a heart transplant, but at least one gave him a slightly better prognosis:
“The other doctor said, ‘Well, I think this is attributable to training too hard, but with consumption of alcohol. I think if you never drink again and you take the medicine we’re going to give you, you take it easy in the gym, then your heart can somewhat of a recovery.'”
There’s a lot more in this interview, including details about Leben’s battle to get off Suboxone, the steps he’s taking for recovery, and much more. So check the whole thing out over on MMAFighting.