Maycee Barber is still coming to terms with both the first loss of her career against Roxanne Modafferi and the fact that she also suffered an ACL injury in the opening seconds of the fight that will now keep her out of action for much of this year.
In hindsight Barber has been left frustrated by the cageside doctor, David Watson, who not only examined her knee during the fight, but also gave an immediate diagnosis, while still allowing her to continue fighting.
”I was doing everything I could to disguise the fact that I had been compromised,” Barber told MMA Fighting. “I feel like the fact that the doctor completely gave away that I was dealing with something. It also made the injury more prominent to me when I was trying to push it out of my head for the fight.
“Had it been me fighting, if I would have seen the doctor stepping in and checking someone’s knee, that would instantly be the thing that I target.”
Barber feels the doctor should have been more discrete and because he wasn’t it left her at even more of a disadvantage than she was beforehand.
”I feel as though the doctor should have come up to me and ask me if I was good, and then listened to my response,” she wrote. “I personally have never seen anyone sat down in the middle of fight and had a doctor (check) their knee stability, and then proceed to get up and announce to the ref and everyone else there was a small ACL tear and that (the fighter) was ‘fine.’
“I knew something in my knee was torn and I wasn’t fine, but I knew that I could be in the fight, and then after the fight was over, I could cry and deal with it.
”There is absolutely no benefit or reason for the doctor to check me if he was going to let me continue, and there most definitely wasn’t a reason to announce the injury and let me continue knowing full well that he had just ‘shown my hand.’”
