After putting in a hard 25 minutes in his UFC debut against Davi Ramos and coming up short, Austin Hubbard was determined to make an impact in his sophomore effort. 

He did just that taking two out of three rounds from Kyle Prepolec at UFC Vancouver back in September. With the weight of his first UFC victory off his shoulders, Hubbard was ready to celebrate, but his body had other ideas. Those ideas which were planted by some of Prepolec’s strikes. 

“I ate a few leg kicks during the fight, which is pretty typical. It wasn’t like an outrageous number or anything like that,” Hubbard explained. “I only got kicked anywhere from six to maybe ten times - I don’t know the exact count… I’ve been kicked a lot more in other fights.”

After fighting on the first fight of the night, Hubbard soaked up the atmosphere of the rest of the night before his plans to hit up Vancouver with his team. As the card was coming to a close, those aforementioned leg kicks started to take their toll. 

“As the night went on, my leg just got more and more sore,” he said. “By the time the card ended, I was like ‘man, my leg hurts pretty bad’. It was super swollen - literally felt like a rock because it was so swollen,” 

Having assessed the situation, the Elevation Fight Team product started to second guess him upcoming night out. He let his friends, family, and teammates know he wasn’t going anywhere - or so he thought. 

“I said ‘I think I’m just going to go up to my room and relax. I don’t think I’m going to make the trip back to downtown and celebrate and everything’. The pain was getting pretty bad,” Hubbard said. “As I was getting up to my room, my coaches were helping me up in the elevator and taking me up into my room, and luckily they were holding me because I actually passed out.”

Now his plan to take it easy and stay in was no longer an option. His team insisted that he get checked out, knowing that passing out from leg pain is nothing to mess with. They were, of course, correct in their assumptions. 

“Then they obviously called the ambulance and forced me to go to the hospital at that point. I got to the hospital thinking I was just going to get some pain medicine and be on my way pretty much,” he remembers. “They did the pressure test and decided that they had to rush me to emergency surgery. I [had] what’s called Compartment Syndrome.”

Compartment Syndrome is caused when pressure inside of a muscle or muscles becomes too high and as a result it lowers the blood flow. This in turn causes lack of oxygen to the limb as well as the pretty serious pain that Hubbard was feeling. 

Although the first surgery was ultimately a success, it was not the only one that he would need thanks to his ailment. 

“I ended up being in Vancouver for a whole week after the fight and had three surgeries,” he said.“Definitely was not the way I thought my post-fight celebration was going to go, but that’s the way it went.”

His overwhelmingly bright outlook on the whole situation is mostly sparked by the fact that he was back in the gym hitting the pads just a month after his last surgery (he was back to his full plate of activities within two months). In addition, it’s helpful to know that the likelihood of this extremely rare condition rearing its ugly head again is zero percent. 

“They said it was impossible to happen again because the fascia has been cut. I hope that’s the case. I don’t want to find out,” Hubbard said with a laugh “I’m literally the first case in UFC history - I was told - to even have the surgery due to Compartment Syndrome. If it happens to me again, I better start playing the lottery.”

All joking aside, Hubbard is happy to be getting a chance to build on his win.