Sometimes you don’t want to be right.
There are times I’m right in life and I get the chance to feel good about myself and say how I have the foresight to collect data making me a genius and should be listened to. Then there are times I get things wrong and I am once again thrown into the same randomness that every one of us find ourselves in on a daily basis. Friday night, I picked every winner of those fights and Saturday I picked all the losers. Just the way it happens, but it makes me sad to say I was right and when it comes to Yang Jian Bing, the One FC fighter who’s death got shuffled into a fight weekend where knockouts and belts changing hands shoved everything else that wasn’t named Edgar, Rockhold or McGregor straight into oblivion. I wanted to try and explain to people in basic terms what happened and why and if it’ll happen again.
Yang Jian Bing’s death is listed as cardiopulmonary failure, most of you know this better as a “heart attack” which is a strange way of explaining it. Nothing is attacking the heart at all. The heart isn’t being beat up like your liver is after a long night of drinking. It’s doing the opposite of being attacked as it’s being completely deprived of attention. It’s the lack of fluids that need to be circulated and the fact that there are not enough of those fluids to circulate things such as blood, which the heart is pretty useful at circulating that causes cardiopulmonary failure.
If you wondered, how did an athlete that trains day in and day out to be a fighter die of a heart attack (without having a heart abnormality)? The easiest answer is, water.
The longer answer is something called “Plasma”. I have it, you have it and currently it makes up about 55% of how much you weigh. Plasma is a yellowish liquid that you can donate and save lives (and you should, you should all donate blood and platelets and plasma whenever you can, free cookies) and currently plasma is what is holding all of your blood cells in suspension (floating).
The easiest way to understand this is, think of plasma as a road and think of cars as red blood cells. The Red Blood cells can move very fast so long as the road is well taken care of. Meaning, if you are well hydrated the blood can move freely through your body, going to your heart getting pumped around and around and eventually dying, becoming a skin cells and flaking off on your bed which you probably don’t vacuum and that’s gross as it piles up (think of all your ex’s, that is still on the mattress buddy, vacuum it every couples months will ya.) But with a lack of water in the body, think of those roads (plasma) like roads in Haiti. There is no infrastructure, it sucks and cars can’t go 200 kilometers an hour like super rocket ships, instead they can only go about 1 kilometers per hour as there is no road for them to drive on.
Without roads to drive on the cars get stuck, they stop moving which when it comes to cells being pumped around your body, is a very bad thing. That is the easiest way to explain that.
I wrote more here, much more actually. I will tell you that it was a science lesson on osmosis, things being hypo or hypertonic and when they become isotonic and so on. I deleted it. I wanted to keep it simple. I wanted to end with, that I’m not happy about being right, that the weight cuts would lead to death in a major promotion before someone landing wrong or getting knocked out violently would. And my guess is that it will happen again until someone says, just because you can make the weight doesn’t mean we will let you fight at it. Yang Jian Bing died in a very avoidable way. Not having water. It’s honestly as simple as that.
