Women’s bantamweight champion Kayla Harrison has recovered from neck surgery and will return to the octagon in the UFC 334 co-main event on Nov. 14 at Madison Square Garden in New York. The two-time Olympic gold medalist faces faces arguably the greatest female fighter of all time, former two-division titleholder Amanda Nunes.
A month from the fight, Harrison says she’s feeling great.
“I feel awesome,” Harrison said on Deep Waters. “To be honest, it was rough at the beginning. I think more just, I mean obviously physically but mentally. Like, it was such a big surgery.
“I went ten years without having surgery. I had reconstructive knee surgery between my two Olympics and then I went ten years with no surgery. But in the last four years I’ve had four surgeries back to back to back to back and this one was the most serious … But I’m back. I’m back.”
“I had a two-level fusion. So I have five herniated discs,” Harrison explained. “I wanted to do the disc replacement because I hear that’s much better and then when the doc went in he was like, ‘Yeah, no you can’t.'”
Initially, Harrison and Nunes were scheduled to fight at UFC 324 in January but Harrison’s neck injury prevented it from happening.
“You have to remember, I was trying to make it to my fight. So, this is two weeks before I’m supposed to fight Amanda. I can’t lift my arm. I’m getting lightning bolts. The last five days I think I slept maybe like three hours because I’d fall asleep and then the lightning bolts. It’s the worst pain ever. So, finally, the UFC was like, “Go to New York.” I flew to New York. The doctor looked at all the stuff. He was like, ‘Yeah, you need surgery now. When do you want to have it?’ I was like, I mean “as soon as possible.”
Harrison took an Uber to the hospital the next morning and went into surgery at 6 a.m.
“I didn’t know anything. I was just like, “Get me out of pain and like get me on the road to recovery as fast as you can,” she said.
Nine months later she’s recovered and ready to defend her title.