UFC Hall of Famer Don Frye has endured a medical journey that would break most people, literally and figuratively. The legendary MMA star has undergone between 17 and 22 surgeries over the years, with complications so severe that two different physicians almost vomited during his procedures.
Frye’s troubles began in professional wrestling and figh ting, where he broke his back multiple times. In a span from May 2010 to May 2011, he had five back surgeries due to ongoing complications. Despite these procedures, Frye made what he now calls a “pretty darn” foolish decision to compete again in October 2011.
The situation worsened dramatically after a truck accident on Interstate 10 in California. A tire blowout sent his vehicle bouncing off the guardrail three times before landing in the median. Though he walked away from the crash, Frye lived with undiagnosed broken rods in his back for two and a half years. “That’s how dumb I am,” he admitted in a recent video.
The broken hardware in his spine, which had fused 10 or 11 vertebrae, finally led to an 11-hour surgery in September 2016, followed by additional hours scraping scar tissue from years of walking on the damaged spine.
Four days post-surgery, Frye began complaining of headaches. A CAT scan revealed he had suffered a hemorrhagic stroke.
Doctors placed him in a medically induced coma for a month. During that time, he developed sepsis and pneumonia, and his heart stopped three times. One particularly severe infection in his spinal cord produced such grotesque results that two different doctors told him they nearly got sick when they opened him up.
“The pus, you know, they’d just open it up and slice the spine,” Frye recalls.
How does someone maintain sanity through such ordeals? For Frye, humor is the only path forward.
“I lived through it, you know. I mean, you laugh or you cry about it and don’t do any good to cry about it,” he explains. “Life’s tough. And if you don’t laugh about the problems that come along with it, then it’s going to destroy you.”
Now able to walk, albeit not perfectly, Frye has found relief through stem cell treatments in Colombia and Tijuana. After one session at BioAccelerator in Colombia, he went from being wheeled in to walking out two hours later.
While the treatments have significantly improved his quality of life, the veteran MMA star acknowledges that athletes compress multiple lifetimes of wear into a short competitive window.
Despite everything, Frye has no regrets. When asked if it was worth it, his response is immediate: “Yeah, it was worth it. Yeah, I’d do it again.”
