As you might expect Anderson Silva took a lot of painkillers in the months after his horrific leg break at UFC 168 at the end of 2013 and the former middleweight champion admits in a new interview that he feared becoming addicted to the drugs.
“I thought that I was getting used to the pain but I wasn’t,” Silva told Globo. “I hope to not experience that anymore. I don’t wish that for anyone. It was terrible. I’m fine now but there were months of much pain. There were a lot of strong antibiotics that I had to take to end the pain. I started to take and the pain disappeared. When I wasn’t feeling pain, I wanted already to take the pills, that was the point that I stop taking them. I wasn’t addicted but I was feeling myself depressed, the medicine was letting me sleepy.
“I decided to stop, to avoid getting addicted. I started to fill my bathtub of ice. The pain came and I got into the ice. Pain? Ice! Then I got better.”
With the pain largely overcome Silva got back to training began training a lot earlier than many people had anticipated, but while he showed remarkable progress he admitted a few months ago that he was still suffering something of a mental block when it came to using his leg.
However, according to his teammates it would appear that he’s managed to overcome that hurdle.
“I wish he had this mental block because he’s kicking me a lot, and he’s kicking fucking hard,” Rafael ‘Feijao’ Cavalcante says of his sparring sessions with Silva. “He’s bigger than me, so he usually kicks me a lot in training because I like to close the distance when I’m fighting. He’s kicking hard, thank God.”
During his recovery Silva also went back and forth on the idea of facing current champion Chris Weidman for a third time, but with UFC president Dana White now saying that ‘The Spider’ will get a title shot if he defeats Nick Diaz at UFC 183 on January 31st, it seems that the Brazilian superstar is mentally ready if the opportunity does arise.
“Only the time will tell about this,” Silva said. “If I get credentials again to fight for the belt and I have to face Weidman one more time, I’ll face him with no problem. I think that I still have some time to do what I love. The competition drives us.”
