Ian McCall can’t seem to catch a break. Since January of 2015, several consecutive fight bookings have failed to come to fruition for the top-ranked flyweight as fights with Dustin Ortiz, Ray Bog, Justin Scoggins, Neil Seery x 2 and, most recently Seery’s replacement, Jarred Brooks have all failed to materialise for a variety of reasons.
Ailments from a broken hand, a knee injury, a groin injury and a viral infection are just some of the causes for the series of scrapped bouts that McCall has been forced to endure but his pulling out of the recent UFC 208 card in Brooklyn was for far more alarming reasons.
As McCall explained on a recent edition of the The Joe Rogan Experience podcast (and reported by MMAFighting), a shrunken gall-bladder was the culprit this time around — something which grossly impeded his weight cut.
“I’ve never made weight that easy in my entire career,” said McCall. “You ask anybody, usually you stop drinking water 24 hours out from weigh-ins. I cut weight Thursday night and it was going so well that I had five glasses of ice water throughout the night. So then I figured I could eat a little bit. So I tried to eat a little bit of salad and I threw that up. But I figured that was just the dressing or something messing my stomach up. So I had at least a cup of almonds, about five cups of water, I cut the rest in the morning and then when I was trying to gain weight back my body wouldn’t. I couldn’t hold on to anything. I kept throwing up everything.
“By the next morning, I had still only gained five pounds. Everything I tried to eat, I threw up. And I was throwing up in front of all the other fighters. Every single chance we ended up having to be in a group in public, I ended up f**king throwing up.
McCall visited hospital as a precaution and while there was given some sobering words.
“I asked them, I’m like. ‘Listen, just let me fight…’ And they looked at me like, ‘No dude, you need to go to the hospital.’ Then they were gonna do emergency gallbladder surgery which they didn’t have to do thank god. This whole thing scared the shitt out of me. When the doctor says, ‘Oh well you could die, you never know,’ I’m like, what the fuck do you mean you never know?
“[My gallbladder] was super shrunk – contracted. I guess [from the dehydration]. And then they saw shadowing and some other stuff [on the tests] and they thought I had gall stones… Then they did a more advanced version of the ultrasound and they didn’t see anything so they didn’t have to do [surgery]. So basically we’re just running tests, been running tests all week.
“I’m still skinny. I went home a day later than I was supposed to go home and I was still under 135 pounds – 132 pounds. I wasn’t able to hold food down until Tuesday. My body just f**kin’ failed me.”
McCall, now 32-years-old, has fought just six times since debuting with the company in early 2012 and problems cutting weight could potentially be seen as his body reacting to several years’ worth of weight cuts. There is no word yet as to if and when McCall will be booked by the UFC to fight again but hopefully this latest setback isn’t the last we hear from McCall.
