Michael ‘Mayday’ McDonald had a busy 2013, losing a title challenge to then UFC interim bantamweight champion Renan Barao, bouncing back to win Submission of the Night and Fight of the Night vs. Brad Pickett, and finally losing to Urijah Faber. Due to a series of injuries, ‘Mayday’ didn’t fight again until 2016, tapping Masanori Kanehara in January, and losing to John Lineker in July. He think moved to Bellator MMA, fighting just once in 2017, and once in 2018, a 58 second KO of former Bellator champ Eduardo Dantas.

McDonald recently announced his retirement at age 27. During a recent appearance on The MMA Hour, the fighter explained why. He went to the ER after returning home from his last fight, had hand surgery which prevented the need for amputation, but it left him with a withered left arm.

I have zero function of my left bicep whatsoever, explained McDonald, as transcribed by Shaun Al-Shatti for MMA Fighting. There was an issue during the surgery, and we think it was the anesthesiologist, not the surgeon that I had, that I actually have zero ability to use my left bicep whatsoever. It’s completely dead. So, already my left arm is like half the size of my right arm. Now it’s been almost a month that I have not been able to use my left bicep whatsoever, so I can’t open a jar, I can’t get a box out of the cupboard, I lift a sheet of plywood or a cabinet. Nothing.

I talked to my surgeon about it and he used a lot of big words and told me a lot about it. He said, ‘The way that this happened, it’s still connected, but basically it’s not coming back, it’s not waking back up.’ Now, there are different reasons that people’s muscles don’t come back after surgery, but this particular reason and how this happened is about a 1-in-8,000 chance. My surgeon is a surgeon of 20 years and he said he’s never seen it happen to any of his patients, so it’s quite a rare thing when it happened.

The good news is all recorded cases have recovered that have been recorded in a medical journal. It’s not a for-sure thing that it comes back, but the odds are in my favor that it does. But just because it comes back doesn’t mean it’s not a huge burden on my life. They said on average it can take up to six months to come back, so literally not being able to use your arm for six months, that kinda sucks.

A devout Christian, McDonald prayed on it.

Part of that prayer was me saying, ‘God, I don’t want any what-ifs.’ I don’t want any, ‘Oh man, what if I kept going?’ And, ‘Oh man, should I really be doing this now?’ God said that he is not a god of confusion, so make me sure. Make me have zero confusion. Let me be sure, and if you make me be absolutely positive, then I will change my path and I will relentlessly pursue it, just like how you commanded me to pursue my fighting career to the best of my abilities. So he made it 100-percent clear that I’m supposed to be moving on and that the price outweighs the reward at this time with fighting, both for me personally, for my life, just everything about it.

This is my fifth hand surgery in five years, and like I said, not only that, I almost lost my hand. I have possible permanent damage, and after the surgery, I am not joking, this was the absolute worst pain of my entire life. It would not stop. It was like someone took one of my Jet parallel clamps that I use in my woodshop and just freakin’ clamped it down to 10. It was excruciating to the point where I didn’t think it could get any worse. I was like, ‘Okay, this is a 10. This is the most pain that anyone could possibly feel,’ and I’m like, ‘I can’t get worse.’ And it got worse, 10 times over; it just got worse and worse and worse over eight hours, to the point where I was just pushed to exhaustion at the most excruciating pain I’ve ever been in in my life, of just pushed to tears.

I was just so exhausted of feeling that pain. After these experiences, I would never want to even put myself in a situation where I have to do this again. Hard pass.

I have no regrets. Even the losses, I learned so much from my losses. I learned so much about masculinity, about being an adult, just about success, through these losses, even more so than the wins. So I think it was an incredible learning experience. God really showed it to me that, it’s like college. I was fighting 13 years. Someone goes and gets a Ph.D. for 12 years — that’s basically what I did. I got a Ph.D. in success, in hard work. I have a great community of people around me now, and I’m equipped to do my next thing with zero debt, so that’s kinda how God showed me this period of my life was kinda like college.

Mayday is left now with memories.

I have some good ones, but definitely, without question, my favorite MMA memory was after my fight with Alex Soto,” he said. “I got a message from a girl. And it turned out that I married her, so that was pretty cool.”

My wife’s father, so now my father-in-law, is my coach’s best friend, and we never met. She’s a lifelong martial artist, she’s been doing martial arts since she was 2, she outranks me in martial arts, but we never met though. And she came to my fight to support my coach, and then after that she sent me a message on Facebook, congratulated me, and I learned that not only is she a dancer, but she’s also a very attractive martial artist, so I started flirting with her, took her out on a date, and here we are.

And UG, if you live in the vicinity of Modesto, California, and want some incredible custom woodwork, check out Mayday’s Custom Woodworks.

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