Chael Sonnen and his wife lost their daughter, Blauna, 6 days after her birth last August.
This Saturday, Chael Sonnen will step inside the Octagon in Bellator’s clash of the former UFC legends against Tito Ortiz. “The American Gangster” recently opened up regarding the tragic circumstances surrounding the loss of his daughter last year, in an interview with Jim Rome of The Jim Rome show:
“Brittany was sick and we kept going to the doctors, we were at three different emergency rooms and four doctors in total. And they kept telling us it’s dehydration and they kept putting an IV in her and rehydrating her and finally I had to get big and strong and I told the doctor, look nobody knows more about hydration than me not even you doctors you guys don’t ever see dehydration. I come from the one and only field where you have to make weight before you can do your job. If you tried to weigh anybody in any other form of society before you let them work you’d be sued, I know all about dehydration, I wrote a book about dehydration, I said this is not a dehydrated woman, we have to stop with that…there has to be another diagnosis. They put an IV in her. They gave her another liter of saline and it was just so frustrating. And we finally got to the hospital when Blauna was born and the doctors ran a test and she has listeria. And had we known that the whole thing could have been prevented and I don’t blame anybody, but it was very frustrating to just keep being told dehydration.”
Sonnen further expressed his frustrations:
“They just argued with me. They’re just trained on their books,” Sonnen said. “They didn’t know what else was wrong with her. They couldn’t diagnose anything. And they just kept pointing to dehydration.”
In what were truly tragic circumstances, Sonnen has been quite reserved in the past. The MMA community were quick to offer their condolences, and fans will be delighted to see the colorful love-to-hate character back in the octagon following Nov. 2013’s loss to Rashad Evans.