He laughs, knowing how bizarre that sounds, but a lot of things sound bizarre in the reality that is the life of a fighter. And knowing that it took him nearly a decade to make it to the big show, the Victoria native wasn’t about to let some pain slow him down. But when an April 2020 bout with Alex da Silva got shut down due to the growing COVID-19 pandemic, Connelly was forced to travel back home to Canada from Las Vegas and deal with more inactivity. You can imagine what happened next.
“It was sitting around for two months doing nothing, and over the course of five days, my symptoms went from 10 percent to a thousand percent,” he said. “It was the worst pain I had ever been in, and the only thing that could have brought it on was inactivity.”
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He tried to rehab the injury again with no success, leaving surgery the only option. That’s when he made the call to House in the midst of hearing some doctors saying his fighting career might be over.
“I had several doctors saying, why do you want to keep fighting with this injury, you should retire, blah, blah, blah,” Connelly recalls. “I had one surgeon tell me I was going to get paralyzed if I fought or got put in a choke again or got punched. I was like, that seems a little strange, how come I never heard of that happening? So I realized then, not all doctors are the same; you gotta do your own research because if someone tells you something’s gonna happen, and I can’t find an entire example, ever in the history of the internet of my injury ever causing paralysis, it shows the importance of your research and talking to other people, and not just taking the first person you talk to. But I wasn’t even going to consider retirement until I chased every single option as far as it possibly goes. Option one was rehab, it didn’t work. Option two was surgery and that went well and now I’m feeling great and ready to go.”