‘It got really scary’: Daiane Silva’s manager pushes for serious changes to weight cutting in MMA after near-death experience 

It’s a message Alex Davis never expected much less one that he wanted to see.

The veteran manager, who works with athletes such as Edson Barboza, John Lineker, Amanda Ribas and Norma Dumont, has spent almost his entire life around martial arts, but nothing could have prepared him for when one of his newest clients was on the way to the hospital following a harrowing weight cut.

This past September, Daiane Silva was preparing for a short-notice fight in Bellator when her body shut down as she tried to shed the final few pounds to compete at featherweight for the first time in her career. While Silva acknowledged beforehand that the weight cut wasn’t going to be easy, she was confident she would get the job done but kidney failure from dehydration resulted in her being rushed to the hospital for emergency care.

“A person like me has fighters all over the world, and the weekend comes, you have a bunch of events and a bunch of fighters you’re following,” Davis told MMA Fighting. “So the last I heard when I checked on her, she was going to make weight. The next morning I wake up and I have messages telling me she went to the hospital. That’s how it happened. That’s how I got the news.

“This had never happened to me. I had never experienced it, I didn’t know enough about it. It was a first for me, the whole situation what happens. I don’t know if there’s different degrees of going to the hospital. Unfortunately, it was a very educational situation for me. Because I did not completely understand what happens to an athlete once they go over that cliff.”

Once Silva arrived at the medical facilities in London, doctors determined the best course of action was placing her in a medically induced coma. While news about Silva’s situation eventually became public, initially PFL officials in charge of Bellator didn’t issue any kind of statement and there was almost no acknowledgement about what actually happened.

Davis admits the silence was on purpose due to a request from Silva’s family, who wanted to keep her status private while they navigated a terrifying ordeal as she was literally fighting for her life.

“It’s very scary,” Davis said. “Daiane and her family all through the process, they didn’t want anything divulged in the media.

“I’m just going to as far as I can go on the medical side — as soon as it happens, Bellator did a very good job. They found out they had a problem, they got a doctor on it. When the doctor saw how serious it was, they got her to the ambulance. They got her to the hospital. If they hadn’t acted [as quickly], mainly Eduardo [Lima], who works for PFL and Bellator during the event, if they had not acted that fast, it could have been a different outcome.”

Once doctors put Silva into the medically induced coma, Davis stayed in constant contact with the hospital along with Silva’s family and coaches with meetings taking place during all hours of the day and night due to the time difference in London.

Davis admits he’s personally witnessed more than a few fighters fall ill from a horrendous weight cut, but even he didn’t know it could end up with Silva in a coma with grim prospects for her future.

“I got the news she’s in a medically induced coma, I have no idea what happens from that point,” Davis said. “I thought that you’ve got a person who passes out and she’s losing weight and you just rehydrate them, but that’s not what happens. Now I know. I’m not a doctor so excuse me if I say anything here that’s not exactly correct but what happens here in a macro way is when you dehydrate [yourself], your sodium goes up really high. That is a big problem for your kidneys, for your brain, for everything.

“The next problem is you cannot drop the sodium fast in a situation like that. If not, it will create brain lesions. I didn’t know about this. I was ignorant to this exact sequence of events. Then the next thing we have is a meeting with the hospital, we’ve got a group together, and we have the first meeting with the hospital. The first prognosis we had that she was going to be on dialysis for the rest of her life possibly and she could be unconscious for a long time. That’s when it got really scary. When you hear doctors, specialists telling you these things, then you get really scared.”

With Silva’s condition not improving, Davis began speaking to her doctors about potentially taking her back home to Brazil, which would have required a specialized medical transport with a doctor and nurse on board to monitor her condition.

He praised PFL and Bellator officials for continued support during that time and Davis said the company didn’t blink at potential costs associated with the care she needed. Davis also praised one of Silva’s closest friends, who flew from Brazil to London to remain by her side as she faced an uncertain future.

“We had a group of people working, everybody’s on top of this,” Davis said. “She had an angel, a friend of hers, who was an angel in her life, stayed beside her through thick and thin and is still beside her.

“It seemed like we were going to have to put her in an ambulance plane with a doctor and a nurse to send her back to Brazil. Mike Kogan, Eduardo from Bellator, they never blinked an eye. They said whatever she needs. Whatever is needed. You can only imagine what that would cost but they never blinked.”

Before they could get the flight scheduled to bring Silva home again, Davis witnessed an unexpected miracle that changed everything.

“Amazingly, she started getting better,” Davis said. “She started showing improvement. Slow improvement with this angel beside her. When you have a situation like this, they start bringing her out of the coma but it’s not like you turn on a switch and she wakes up. No, it happens slowly. She’s coming back slowly and it’s important to have someone there talking and stimulating her. That’s how that process happened.

“She started getting up. She started talking. She was intubated and they managed to take her tubes out and then it was up and up and up. We’re still going up, but she’s not playing basketball yet. There’s still a long road to go until she’s fully healed.”

Silva eventually did return home to Brazil where she’s still receiving care in a long-term facility on her long road to recovery. At this stage, Silva is now incurring all the costs for her medical care with Davis revealing plans to start a GoFundMe to help defer some of those costs.

By all accounts, Silva is expected to make a full recovery but Davis knows the situation could have easily turned out far worse, which is why he’s hoping her near-death experience becomes a cautionary tale to prevent further weight-cutting disasters like this from happening again.

“It made me realize first of all I find it amazing this doesn’t happen more or at least we don’t know about it more,” Davis said. “I had one case where I was at an event, I’m not going to say specifics or anything, but everybody is at the event, everybody is losing weight in the room and one of the guys was on the floor groaning and saying his back was hurting. The trainer was saying, ‘You’ve got to keep on going, you’ve got to be professional!’ I turned around and said, ‘It’s not about being professional — he’s groaning and he’s having pain, his kidneys are collapsing. You must get him to the doctor now!’

“I went and got the event staff and said you’ve got to look at this guy now, if not he’s going to have a kidney collapse. Sure enough they got him to the doctor, they sent him to the [emergency room] and in this case they managed to rehydrate him before he really crashed.”

It’s become common to hear about an athlete suffering through a brutal weight cut and then being transported to a hospital for treatment, which usually involves a doctor administering an IV to slowly reintroduce fluids to treat severe dehydration.

Davis says normalizing those kinds of health risks to athletes is perhaps the biggest problem plaguing combat sports right now, but it hit even closer to home for him after what happened to Silva.

“It was a big wake-up call for me,” Davis said. “It’s like when we have a mess at home and we’re so accustomed to seeing that mess that we don’t clean it up. We’re human beings. That’s what happens in everybody’s life. Your car’s dirty, but you don’t clean it up. You sit down in the car, and drive, and you don’t even notice things anymore. I think that with this process, we’re in that situation.

“We’ve become hardened to it. We’ve become accustomed to it. We think this is normal. We just think this is the way things are. We can change it but first it takes us realizing this is wrong. I don’t know who else has to go through this. I don’t know if someone else has to die. I don’t know what it’s going to take. The truth is as wrong as it is, as ignorant as it is, it’s still happening.”

Back in 2015, Yang Jian Bing died after suffering through a horrendous weight cut while preparing to compete for ONE Championship. As a result, the Asia-based promotion decided to dramatically alter its weight classes as well as how the organization handles weight cutting with athletes.

For the past few years, ONE has implemented hydration testing that requires fighters to hit certain marks to medically clear them to compete. While ONE’s system has faced scrutiny at times, Davis applauds the organization for trying to curb the extreme weight cuts that potentially harm fighters in both the short and long term.

“Personally, I think [ONE’s weight-cutting protocol] is miles ahead of anything else I’ve seen so far,” Davis said. “I understand that Andy [Foster] in California, you can only weigh so much over the weight of the fight, which I think is a positive. However, with ONE’s system, it’s impossible to get up on the scale completely dehydrated. It’s just impossible to do it. I’ve heard you can cheat it this way, you can cheat it that way, maybe you can cheat it a little bit but I guarantee you no one gets on those scales deeply dehydrated. It’s a world of difference.

“If you go to a weigh-in at ONE, you don’t see people almost fainting and shaking and sitting back there lethargic. Everybody’s up and everybody’s alert and it’s a little bit complicated because you have to make your weight and you need to make your hydration.”

Davis acknowledges that he doesn’t have all the answers when it comes to the changes that should be implemented to prevent further weight cutting disasters, but he knows it’s a subject that needs a lot more attention.

The same weight-cutting procedures that happen in the UFC are also taking place in the PFL and almost every other major organization around the world so Davis knows it’s a problem that extends beyond just any one fight or promotion.

But if there’s one thing that he hopes the combat sports world can take away from Silva’s terrifying situation, it’s that this could happen to anybody and sadly, she’s likely not the last person to nearly lose her life trying to make weight for a fight.

“I don’t know who else has to go through this,” Davis said. “I don’t know if someone else has to die. I don’t know what it’s going to take. The truth is as wrong as it is, as ignorant as it is, it’s still happening.

“This can happen. It will probably happen again. Just because it doesn’t happen all the time does not mean what we’re doing is correct. There’s a huge risk that taking. I’ve had fighters faint in my hands. It brought me to the realizing to how close was this guy to it happening to him? I don’t know where the threshold is where you drop off that cliff but it makes me realize a lot of people all over the world come really close to that cliff. We have to wake up to it.”