Bellator fighter Daiane Silva is on the road to recovery after she returned home to Brazil following a long stay in the hospital where she was comatose following a brutal weight cut back in September.
Bellator fighter Daiane Silva expected to make full recovery after she was comatose following harrowing weight cut
Damon Martin is a veteran journalist and insider covering combat sports since 2003.
Originally slated to compete at the Bellator London card, Silva suffered kidney failure from dehydration, which required her to be placed in a medically induced coma as doctors continued to monitor her condition. She spent several weeks in the hospital, but eventually came out of the coma and now Silva has not only been released but she was able to return home to Brazil.
“The first prognosis we had was that she could be with dialysis for the rest of her life and it could take months for her to regain consciousness,” Silva’s manager Alex Davis told MMA Fighting on Monday. “But thanks to a lot of different factors like a very, very good friend of hers was an angel that stayed with her all the time and thanks to her very good physical shape and the help of the hospital and the doctors, thanks to the support of Bellator, of Mike Kogan and Eduardo Lima, and thanks to Cristiano Marcello, her trainer, thanks to all that worked so hard. We’d get up at three in the morning, I’d get up at 3:00 in the morning to have meetings with these people.
“Out of a very sorry prognostics, she is [now] walking, she is awake, she is off the dialysis machine. She’s talking. She has a little bit of difficulty, it was a very, very serious condition she came out of. She’s back in Brazil. She’s at a rehabilitation center and we expect her to be 100 percent recovered.”
Yahoo! Sports initially reported the update on Silva’s condition.
When Silva was first hospitalized, Bellator officials didn’t respond to inquiries about her condition but PFL co-founder Donn Davis later explained that it wasn’t the promotion’s place to reveal private medical information while she was still fighting for her life.
“I’ll tell you it’s specifically not been addressed for the fighter privacy,” Davis told MMA Fighting in October. “Everything you just said fully explains the situation. She was a first-time fighter for us, she experienced a very difficult weight loss which resulted in a medical emergency which was dealt with seriously and appropriately and she’s been in long-term hospitalization and we’ve done everything possible to support her recovery.
“To say anything other than that is not our place. This is her business and her privacy but everything I just said is the news and that’s the news that is well known and that’s the news that we wouldn’t want to say anything other than that news.”
Thankfully, now Silva has been released from the hospital and she’s recovering back home in Brazil.
With a 3-0 record as a professional fighter, Silva signed with Bellator for a short-notice bout against Eman Almudhaf at the card in London in September. Despite previously only competing at 155 pounds, Silva accepted the bout at featherweight but anticipated she would endure a grueling cut to get down to the 146-pound limit for a non-title fight.
While Silva is now out of danger physically, her full focus remains on recovering and there’s no word about a potential return to fighting just yet.
