UFC heavyweight champion Tom Aspinall dropped a revelation during his appearance on Jamie Laing’s podcast, casually admitting that he had undergone a vasectomy and that it ranks as one of the most unpleasant experiences of his life.
The disclosure came as Aspinall was discussing his recent eye surgeries, which followed the controversial eye poke incident in his match against Ciryl Gane. Aspinall had three surgical procedures on his eyes, one on the left and two on the right, after the incident left him completely blind in one eye for approximately four weeks.
“By the way, I’ve had the snip, right? I’ve had a vasectomy,” Aspinall told host Jamie Laing. “And I was thinking like that is got to be the worst surgery ever, mate. Compared to eye surgery is nothing.”
Aspinall went on to describe what the eye surgery was actually like, and it was not for the faint-hearted. Surgeons kept him fully awake throughout the procedure, using a device to hold his eyelid open before administering numbing drops and an injection to the side of his eye.
“They’re coming at you with like a scalpel or a knife or whatever it’s called and you’re just watching them slice your eyeball open,” he said. “It was horrendous. It was horrible. I don’t want to do that again.”
He admitted that in the early days following the Gane match, when his vision had completely disappeared in one eye, the prospect of never seeing again was a very real fear.
“The first two weeks, mate, I was really scared about it to be honest,” he said.
His eyesight has since recovered well, though it took three operations to get there.
For Aspinall, the comparison was straightforward: lying awake watching a surgeon cut into your eyeball makes a vasectomy feel like nothing by comparison.
Aspinall is expected to return to action later this year, with Ciryl Gane as the likely next opponent for the heavyweight champion.
