Former UFC light heavyweight champion Jan Blachowicz underwent eye surgery on Monday to repair damage suffered against fellow 205-pound contender Aleksandar Rakic in the UFC Vegas 54 main event on ESPN2 last weekend in “Sin City.”
“We do the small surgery, they fix my eye, they put something inside for six weeks, some kind of tube, so after six weeks I need to take it out,” Blachowicz told his Instagram followers. “I still feel the drugs they give to me and I enjoy it very much.”
The tube implant is common in glaucoma shunt surgery and allows fluid to bypass the eye’s own drainage pathway to help lower eye pressure and prevent swelling. The injury came in the first round of his Rakic headliner and may have been from an inadvertent eye poke.
“I feel it when it happened. It was in the beginning of the first round, one of the first punches,” Blachowicz said at the UFC Vegas 54 post-fight press conference (watch it here). “I don’t see anything in the first round with this eye.”
Blachowicz (29-9) wasn’t the only injured combatant at UFC Vegas 54. Rakic would eventually lose their bout by way of collapsing knee, leaving the Polish power puncher on a very short list of eligible contenders to battle the winner of this upcoming title fight.