Here’s the doctor who worked on Jon Jones’ toe filling the world in on all the gory details.
Dr Michael Kelly is a ringside doctor who also just happens to write about his experiences and thoughts on our beloved sport of MMA for various publications such as Fightland, and has published a book on the art of fight medicine. He’s a pretty fascinating dude, and he’s always up for discussing the nuances and oddities of the violence in our sport, and this week we got a special look at Jon Jones’ toe.
Yep, this toe:
No warning! It’s the wild west here on MMANuts. It’s not every day that we get to see the thoughts of the guy who actually touched Jon Jones’ broken toe, so read up! Here’s the Fight Doc:
It’s interesting: Jones didn’t feel pain in his toe at all; it was only when he looked down that he noticed it. And once the adrenaline wore off, then he was sore. It was a fractured toe. There wasn’t much for me to do except clean it up and have him get it set. It was a compound fracture so there was some bone exposed.
I didn’t really hear Joe Rogan call for a doctor during the interview. I was on the side of the Octagon. I had just come out of the cage because I was looking at Sonnen, and I heard Dana White, who was right behind me, say, “I need a doctor.” I don’t really pay attention to the overhead sound system when I’m there because you’re concentrating on the fighters and the job you have to do. So I went back in and I looked down at Jones’ foot, and it was an obvious deformity.
He didn’t sit because he was woozy; he sat down so we could get the weight off it and clean it up. He didn’t really have any ill effects. In fact, you saw him walk out of the ring. I think there was a little bit of shock when he looked down at it but he was absolutely fine, even when we walked him to the back.
The treatment for a compound fracture is to clean up the wound, have it set, and then use antibiotics to make sure there’s no infection. I saw that somebody had said it was sutured and he was allowed to just walk on it. It wasn’t the case. It wasn’t sutured in the arena. Jones wasn’t walking on an open wound. That sounds like a silly quote from someone who doesn’t work many fights. Many fighters get cuts and wounds during their bouts and they’re cleaned up and covered or sutured and allowed to go about their day. The wound was cleaned, it was dressed; there were no sutures placed at the event. The injury was splinted and closed and covered with a dressing, and arrangements were made to have him taken to the emergency room.
Read the rest of the blog post at Fightland.
Even Stitch Duran recalls the “triage unit” working on Bones’ big toe (via MMAJunkie):
“I said, ‘Jon, are you in any pain? Are you OK?’ He said, ‘Yeah, I’m OK,'” said Duran, who added that he loosened the wrap slightly when he felt Jones’ leg jerk in pain.
“It’s like a triage when you’re in the battlefields, you’ve got to get this warrior prepped up so they can take him to the hospital,” Duran said. “I was in the right place at the right time.
“I was talking to doctors in Las Vegas, and they were saying [the bandage has] a matrix that really coagulates the blood, but in doing that, not only does it coagulate the blood, it draws the impurities out.”