Islam Makhachev recently sat down with Red Corner MMA and recalled a strange recovery ordeal following one of his UFC matches, when a teammate accidentally gave him seven laxative tablets instead of activated charcoal.
Makhachev explained that the trouble started shortly after the bout when he began feeling unwell during his post-bout medical checks.
“I had a bad time there,” Makhachev said. “Well, I had a match and won, went to the cutting room, the UFC came there, there to examine, there to see if something was broken. I say, ‘Leave me alone, I just don’t feel well.’”
After returning to his room, he lay down to rest, but one of his teammates insisted he take something to settle his stomach.
“I told him, ‘I don’t want anything. I finally feel a little better and don’t want to eat or drink anything,’” Makhachev recalled.
His teammate persisted, saying, “‘Drink some activated charcoal,’ he says, ‘it will help you.’”
Makhachev said he eventually gave in after repeated encouragement.
He recalled his teammate insisting, “Just listen to me for once and take the activated charcoal.” Trusting his advice, Makhachev took the tablets he was given.
Moments later, the teammate realized something had gone terribly wrong.
“He tells me, ‘Stop,’” Makhachev said. “‘I gave you the wrong thing, the wrong thing.’”
The teammate immediately urged him to get it out of his system.
“Then he told me, ‘You need to throw it up,’” Makhachev said. “I replied, ‘How am I supposed to do that? How can I make myself throw up when my stomach is completely empty?’”
That was when the teammate revealed the mistake.
“He says, ‘I gave you the wrong thing.’ And he runs out, from the room.”
Desperate to fix the situation, the teammate went searching for potassium permanganate, but that plan quickly fell apart.
“He told me, ‘I’ll go get some potassium permanganate,’” Makhachev recalled. “So he ran off to find some, but it turns out you can’t buy potassium permanganate without a prescription anymore.”
The search proved unsuccessful. “An hour later he comes back,” Makhachev said. “There is no potassium permanganate.”
Soon afterward, they learned exactly what Makhachev had taken.
“They called soon,” he said. “It turns out that he also gave me seven laxatives, seven laxative tablets then.”
The consequences lingered far longer than anyone expected. Makhachev said the incident affected him for weeks and made it difficult to regain his normal weight and eating habits.
“I felt awful for a long time afterward,” Makhachev said. “For about a month, I couldn’t get back to normal. My weight dropped to around 161 to 163 pounds (73 to 74 kg) and stayed there.”
He was eventually put on a strict diet, but even that became frustrating.
“Any time I ate the wrong thing, I’d feel terrible,” Makhachev said. “The doctors put me on a strict diet. I remember eating rice all the time, plain rice, rice with milk, maybe a little butter or oil for flavor. Eventually, I got so tired of it all. I felt awful.”
According to Makhachev, it took roughly a month and a half before he felt fully recovered. Looking back, he said photos from that period show just how much weight he had lost.
“It was about a month and a half before I felt normal again,” he said. “I still have photos from that time. A week or two after the fight, we went to Derbent with a guest, and my face looked so thin. You could immediately tell something was wrong.”
[Editor’s Note: Quotes have been edited and translated for readability and clarity.]
