Myla hospitalized after having a seizure. Photo: Stevie Ray/Facebook
The UFC lightweight wants to keep his daughter, Myla, and other immunocompromised loved ones safe from those dismissing the severity of coronavirus.
Stevie Ray is urging his friends and the general public to take the threat of coronavirus seriously. And to make his point clearer, he’s making a case for his potentially vulnerable daughter as an example of what he is fighting for.
Ray’s daughter Myla, 4, was diagnosed with epilepsy last year. She suffered her first major seizure in July 2019.
“The hospital ended up putting her in a coma because the medicines weren’t working and stopping the fit. Normally they would give medicines and it would stop, but hers wasn’t stopping so they said they had to put her to sleep to make her brain rest. It was too much damage on the brain,” the UFC fighter told Bloody Elbow. “That was one of the hardest times of my life seeing that.”
The seizure, classified as a tonic-clonic seizure, lasted nearly two hours. Myla subsequently suffered significant seizures in October and December of that year — three in five months. She suffered an additional three mild seizures on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday of this week. Ray shared another story from one of the seizures suffered late last year.
“I remember waking up at half-past-two in the morning. I went for a pee. I didn’t really check on her. My daughter was ill at the time so she was sleeping beside us. She made like a little bed beside us with the covers. Like a wee tent,” he recalled. “My partner got up after me and she checked on her and she was fine… Half past three in the morning, my partner woke me up saying, ‘Steven! Steven! Wake up!’ Myla was on the ground having a fit. A tonic-clonic. She was full-body jerking and unconscious with her eyes open. That was traumatizing for me. That was the first time I’ve seen that.”
Ray is worried that his daughter may be more susceptible to complications from coronavirus. To those who dismiss COVID-19, comparing it to other ailments like the flu or cancer, Ray stresses how quickly the virus spreads and how many cases are uncounted for due to lack of testing.
“All I do know is that it’s spreading. That’s the scary part. It’s spreading so fast,” he said. “It was just frustrating for me some people are just acting like there is nothing going on. [Acting] like who cares if they get it because they’re healthy. Well, fair enough if we can handle it because we are healthy individuals, but what about the people close to you that can’t or have underlying conditions. It got me a wee bit annoyed.”
On Sunday, Ray and his family decided to put distance between themselves and the denser populated areas of his native Scotland.
“I’ve got a bad gut feeling in my belly. Something is going on. This is bad. I said, ‘F—k it, let’s just go away tomorrow.’ This was on Sunday,” he explained. “A two-week holiday in a log cabin in the middle of nowhere.”
Ray, 29, emphasized that Myla is currently doing well and bounces back remarkably from her seizures. He and his partner share four children: son Lyle, 9, and daughters Millie, 7, Myla, 4, and Lara, 8 weeks.