An edited version of this essay appeared in print.
I’m an agree-er. A head nodder. An always amenable conflict avoider.
I think I’ve always had these compulsive peacekeeping tendencies, but it has worsened over time. With age and responsibilities—to my family, to my job and patients, to paying the mortgage, even to the damn dog—I’ve become increasingly afraid of disruption, worried that unanticipated, potentially volatile variables will destroy my carefully crafted existence.
Consequently, I’ve become the Paula Abdul of my own life, smoothing over discord, clapping for everyone.
I’ve also made myself small. I immerse myself in the safe, encompassing, little concerns of my little life—worries about my children’s self-esteem, questions about whether the white cabinet from IKEA will hold up over time (or will it just look dirty and cheap?), delight in the gas mileage I get from my Prius.
All of this is to explain why I recently agreed to be the physician for a cage fight.
This is the sport that Sen. John McCain once called “the human equivalent of cock fighting” and that one online commentator described as a “celebration of the excellence of the subhuman spirit.” Two fighters are enclosed in a cage and then hit, kick and wrestle each other for 15 minutes, or until the fight is stopped for medical reasons, such as excessive bleeding or unconsciousness. Needless to say, cage fighting is stupid. Anytime someone purposely puts himself in a situation to get hit on the head, he is being stupid. Furthermore, he is creating the perfect conditions for becoming more stupid.
And cage fighting is, of course, very, very violent.
But when I was asked to work at a cage fight, I said yes.
This is how it happened: My husband’s friend, Bill, was promoting the event, which would be held at the Elks Lodge in Milwaukie, Oregon, just outside of Portland, where we live. There would be several early matches, and the event would culminate in the Big Fight between two seasoned, somewhat locally well-known, fighters. In Oregon, it’s illegal to have a cage fight without a physician present, which makes sense, given the multiple opportunities for serious injury during the event. The snag, though, is that there is no malpractice insurance provided for the physicians staffing the fights. The small cadre of those who might be interested in working at a fight shrinks even further when it becomes clear that they have no financial protection should anyone be injured and sue.
Really, then, for multiple reasons, I should have declined Bill’s request that I be the physician for his fight. But I was so stunned and delighted to think that perhaps he saw me as someone grittier, crazier and much more fun than I know myself to be, that I said yes, without hesitation.
Bill explained that I would need to arrive several hours early to conduct prefight physicals. So, on the afternoon of the event, my husband, Pete, picked me up from my day job as a primary-care physician and researcher at the local university, and we drove straight to the venue. We would miss dinner, so Pete, who approached the entire evening as if it were a really, really great date night, packed us a picnic to eat between fights.
The Elks Club was a big, gray 1970s-style building. The fight would be held in the Lodge Room, a large, dark, wood-paneled room with gold chandeliers hanging from the ceiling and a plaque reading “brotherly love” on the wall.
The cage was elevated on a platform in the middle of the room. It was basically a boxing mat enclosed by a chain-link fence. Rows of chairs had been arranged around the cage on all sides. Tickets ranged from $20 to $35 for an individual seat to $300 for a VIP table. I would be sitting at a table directly in front of the cage. As we walked in, an official was lining up several large white sheets of paper in front of the table, to protect it, and our legs, against blood spatter.
Other than for legal reasons, a physician isn’t really necessary for a cage fight. The Oregon State Athletic Commission hires a physician’s assistant—in this case, a former Army medic named Curtis—to do most of the work. Ostensibly, Curtis was my assistant. For our first task, the physicals, fighters stood in line as we asked them one by one about their medical history, medications, allergies, and presence of open sores or cuts. I checked their vitals and conducted a general physical exam.
And I was surprised.
I’ve never watched the movie Fight Club because—and of course I get the irony here—I can’t handle the violence. But I know the plot, more or less, and I saw the trailer, and I know the fighters are sweaty, hard-bodied, intense men with an edge. Office workers by day, they glistened and growled and menaced at night when they fought. They are shirtless Brad Pitts.
I suppose that is what I expected to find under the chandeliers in the Lodge Room. Instead, I found dozens of awkward, sweaty-but-not-glistening man-boys. They seemed as unsure of what they were doing and how they got there as I was. They were nervous and young and surprisingly soft. Little rolls of excess flesh drooped over the edges of their boxing shorts, and thin layers of fat lay over their back and arm muscles like the slipcovers on old couches. They caved in on themselves, shoulders rounded, eyes on the ground.
Only four of the 11 had been in a cage fight before. During my exam, I asked each fighter why he was fighting.
Almost to a man, they shrugged.
Next, the ref went over the rules. This consisted of a 10-minute lecture on avoiding the testicles, followed by a question-and-answer session. The only question: “Is the domestic violence choke OK?” Answer: “As long as you don’t crush the trachea. Good question.”
Spectators began trickling in at around 5:30 p.m. for the 7 p.m. fight start. Some headed first to the dinner buffet and bar available in an adjoining room. Others milled around the Marine Corps recruiting table that a few officers had astutely erected just outside the entrance to the Lodge Room’s double doors.
Pete and I got purple wristbands that let the organizers know why we were there and that we were allowed to sit up front at one of the long tables in front of the cage during the fights. My band said “Fight Doc.” Pete’s, to his great delight, said “MD Assistant.” Every time someone would call me over to ask my opinion or to inform me of my next task, he would be right beside me, hands clasped behind his back, nodding his head, and bouncing slightly on his toes, ready to work, thrilled to be on the front lines.
Then the fights began. The first fights were easy—mushy men with something to prove who had neither the skill nor the stamina to actually do any damage. Most of those fights lasted less than a minute, ending when the heavier fighter climbed on top of the lighter one.
But as the fighters got better, it became a great deal harder for me. The kicking and wrestling didn’t bother me; it was the punching: the drawing back of an arm and slamming a fist into someone else’s face. I found myself cursing several times. My palms began to sweat, and it was an effort to keep my hands away from my eyes. Sometimes the fighters would slam their bodies right up against the side of the cage facing us. It would sway and bulge. I would try not to cringe.
And the thing about working as a physician for a cage fight, something I definitely should have thought about before signing on, is that the worse the violence got, the more intently I had to focus my attention. When one fighter straddled another and then cocked his arm back, I had to watch every second. Where would his fist hit? How hard? What was the effect? I had to hold my hands together tightly in front of my mouth and nose in order to keep from reflexively covering my eyes or yelping involuntarily.
When I was needed in a match, the ref, a big bald guy and a former fighter himself, would yell at the fighters to stop. They would freeze, as if this were part of a kid’s game, and he would crouch down, shoot his arm and index finger straight out, and point at me. Then Curtis and I would climb the steps to the cage and, with the 400 or 500 inebriated spectators at the Elks Lodge watching, we would examine the fighter.
The first two times we were called in, the fighters had large, menacing swellings over their eyes. These are the same injuries toddlers get when they hit a sharp edge in failed efforts at first steps, or bigger kids get when skateboarding gets out of hand: big, scary-looking broken blood vessels that heal. No real harm, no foul. But in the context of the sweat and the punches and the grunts and the hundreds of spectators watching, they scared me disproportionately. Curtis would interrupt my detailed neurological examination of each injured fighter with a quick glance and a shrug: “Goose-egg,” he would declare. And the fight would resume.
The last fight of the night, the Big Fight, was between two men who had actually fought before. They were bigger than the rest, and had clearly trained for the match. This was the main event and the most violent. Early in the second round, the ref did the freeze-tag thing, pointing at me, and Curtis and I climbed up into the cage. One of the fighters had a laceration on his forehead that was causing blood to stream into his left eye. He also had one tiny pupil and one large one. In medical parlance this is called anisocoria, and it has multiple possible causes—including bleeding into the brain. Not waiting for Curtis this time, and only conducting enough of an exam to verify that the eyes were, in fact, disturbingly irregular, I called the fight. Ended it.
There was a moment of silence, and then the crowd started screaming, booing and jeering. At me.
I stood in the middle of the cage and stared out at the rows of angry, heckling spectators. And I felt fantastic. I was powerful and tough and unmoved by opposition: a good guy who everyone thought was a bad guy, like Spider-Man.
Eventually the jeers died down. I sent the fighter to the hospital, and it was over.
I won’t be back. I am delighted that I don’t have to climb the steps to the cage again. My guess is that most of the fighters feel the same way. But we did it. We all showed that for one night we were different. For the fighters, that meant trapping themselves in cages and pummeling each other, showing that they were more than just regular guys trying to get by. They were fighters. For me, that meant watching the destruction, and sometimes stopping it, being booed, even reviled, showing myself that I was not just a middle-aged mother and wife making mortgage payments and driving my sensible car. For one night, even if only in our own minds, all of us were edgy and tough, maybe a little crazy, maybe a little mean. For one night, we were glistening Brad Pitts.
Jessica Gregg, '88, is the author of Virtually Virgins: Sexual Strategies and Cervical Cancer in Recife, Brazil (Stanford University Press, 2003).
