Maycee Barber has endured the most difficult 18 month stretch of her fighting career and that’s without adding a single loss to her record.
Instead, the 27-year-old flyweight has been battling health issues that effectively derailed her momentum after a six-fight win streak had her on the cusp of title contention. She was scheduled to face former UFC champion Rose Namajunas when Barber ended up in an extended hospital stay that forced her out of action for nearly a year.
Barber finally scheduled a return fight against Erin Blanchfield in May but just seconds before she was supposed to walk out to the octagon, she endured another medical emergency where she woke up in an ambulance with no memory of what just happened. With doctors largely unable to tell her exactly what went wrong, Barber was stuck trying to put the pieces back together with the haunting specter looming overhead that maybe she might never fight again.
“It’s been one of the most challenging things I’ve had to face as far as career wise,” Barber told MMA Fighting. “Because there’s been several times I’ve sat down, not going to lie, I’ve sat down in the kitchen or the living room and I’ve just cried. I’ve never felt so close yet so far. It’s just a complete what the heck. In my career and in my performances, when I’m able to perform and I go out and I do what I’m capable of doing, I can feel the belt. I can feel it. I can see it. I can taste it. I can smell it.
“All of those things, I can just tell it’s right there. It’s at the tip of my fingers but at the same time then life happens and part of me, especially in this last situation, am I going to be able walk out again? What’s going on? Not having those answers and not having that understanding, I’m just like what in the world? I’m so close yet feeling so far.”
Barber admits that pushing through the pain is something that all athletes tend to do but especially fighters who often times deal with nagging injuries that just feel like part of the sport.
Looking back now, she may have been dealing with some early warning signs that her body was shutting down but there’s no way to really know for sure. Perhaps the toughest pill to swallow was doing exactly what the doctors told her to do and still not actually getting healthy enough to fight again.
“For me, I’m a very stubborn person and when I feel tired I’m like I’ll just be good,” Barber explained. “It’s probably just the elevation, I was just training here, I just moved to Denver, all of this stuff. Fast forward, they’re like ‘you have mono, you’re really sick, you can’t even train. You have an enlarged spleen, you could get punched it the body, it could rupture and you could die.’ Those are the kinds of things when you hear that you’re like wait that’s not true. Those kinds of things are weird but they’re invisible. You can’t see them.
“Fast forward to when I was fighting Erin, I’m getting ready for everything and preparing and I’m doing everything that I feel I’m required to do and I’ve known to do and I’ve prepared for fights, several fights, I’ve had so many different fights in the UFC. I know the process. I know what it takes and all the different things I need to do. Then something like that just happens and it’s like I don’t know what this is. I don’t know how to deal with it.”
The initial illness that landed Barber in the hospital back in 2024 required her to undergo treatment that included numerous rounds of antibiotics.
While the life-saving medicine restored her health, the side effects were numerous and long lasting. Still, Barber followed her doctor’s instructions to the letter of the law as she desperately tried to get her career back on track.
“I remember when I was getting ready to fight Rose [Namajunas] and I was in Denver and I remember talking with some of the people at the [UFC Performance Institute] and the doctors and everybody and they’re like ‘we don’t know but you’ll probably be out for like a year, you might need at least a year,’” Barber said. “So I took the year off. I did all the things that I was told you need to reset your body. Because coming out of the hospital, I didn’t have any answers.
“I had been on I think 15 different rounds of antibiotics through IV’s so that alone messes with your body and you don’t know what the effects are of that. Then you have to recover from all of that. On top of that, I come out of the hospital and now I’m trying to build back and I get a camp and I get a fight and then all of a sudden we’re like OK you might be out for longer because your body is still sick but you can’t see it.”
Over the past year and a half, Barber has undergone so many rounds of tests that she’s lost count by now.
After spending so much time in treatment, Barber was never told if her sickness back in 2024 played a part in the last-minute ailment that prevented her from fighting in May but she has a hard time believing the two situations are at least somewhat related.
“I’ve talked to several people, I’ve talked some doctors and I don’t know if there’s necessarily an answer,” Barber said. “But from my opinion and what I’ve kind of gathered and I’m not a doctor but from what I’ve noticed with my body and my healing and everything, it has to be somehow related because when you’re on so many different IV antibiotics and you have an infection in something that you don’t know what it is, it’s a foreign thing and your body’s fighting it and then all of a sudden your body’s being pumped with a bunch of different antibiotics.
“My discharge papers were I think 400 or 500 pages long. When you have all of those different things that your body’s been introduced to in a foreign way, you don’t know how your body’s going to react.”
In some ways, Barber says her body might be forever changed from the medical issues she’s endured or at the very least it’s not something that’s just going to go away overnight.
“One of the things I’ve had issues with now since being out of the hospital, I’ve never had this in my life, one of the things I’ve had to have fixed is my blood pressure,” Barber explained. “After the antibiotics, my blood pressure is extremely low and they didn’t know why. That was one of the things we’ve had to address.
“Blood pressure is very important in functioning as a woman and it’s very important in your cycle and cutting weight and all of those things. Blood pressure regulation is important. So I think if I had to say if I think it was related, I do think it was related to the infection and being in the hospital and just the lingering thing of your body’s been through so much.”
As disappointing as all this has been, Barber credits the UFC for sticking by her side and doing everything possible to get her the help she needs.
That was definitely true after she effectively blacked out just before she was scheduled to face Blanchfield but ultimately got rushed to the hospital instead.
“It’s very difficult and very challenging but luckily having the UFC behind me and having everything there, they were like OK, we’re going to get on top of this,” Barber said. “So they sent me to the best neurologists and went to Boston and worked with them and we did scans and testing and everything and although they didn’t have a clear [reason] this is why it happened, this is what happened, this is exactly word for word [what happened], there’s a lot of different pieces that were put together and they’re like we might not have the exact pinpoint [diagnosis] this is what you have and this is why you have it, but we have a solution.
“The solution that they gave me and that I started doing, it’s worked so far. It’s been able to allow me to train and do everything I need to do to prepare for this fight and I feel amazing. I’m in great shape and I’m in a great mental space. I feel amazing. I’m really just excited to go out and showcase that.”
With a fight now just about a month away, Barber is hopefully putting all those medical issues behind her but she can’t deny the dark places her mind traveled to while she searched for answers with no end in sight.
“There is always that spot where it’s like am I going to be able to do this again?” Barber said. “Knowing what I want and what I have set for myself as far as goals and dreams and plans, and knowing that it’s not necessarily in my hands, it’s really been a lesson and it’s really been something where it’s like you really have to learn that it’s not in our hands, it’s in God’s hands. I really have to allow that to be something. I have to be able to let go of the things that I cannot control and just trust that there’s a plan. I believe there is a bigger plan and a bigger purpose.
“I’ve been through so much in my life. From things that happened to me as a kid to the medical situations that I’ve had to deal with as a professional fighter being this close to the belt. I’ve had a lot of challenges thrown at me and I think that it’s just a [test] of faith and your determination towards your goals and your dreams.”
Of course, Barber understands she’s going to have to keep addressing the same questions about her health until she’s finally able to compete again and then hopefully all the attention goes back on her fight career.
Barber recognizes that the unknowns surrounding her health have probably been the most frustrating part about her time off. It’s nothing like the torn ACL in her knee that once required surgery because Barber knew from operating table to rehab exactly what it would take to get back in the octagon again.
There were no easy answers with these health problems but Barber is confident that she’s going to finally put it all behind her when she fights on Dec. 5.
“Unfortunately people don’t like not having answers. I hate not having answers,” Barber said. “It’s a very frustrating thing but at the end of the day I think that we can all just kind of agree that it’s just nice to be back.”
Make no mistake, Barber isn’t being flippant with her health, especially not after what happened at the UFC APEX in May when it seemed like she was more than ready to fight again.
She’s once again following doctor’s orders during her training camp and undergoing the required testing to ensure there are no more obstacles on her road back to the octagon.
“I feel great,” Barber said. “We’ve been running labs. We’ve been doing testing. We’ve been monitoring everything. Just tracking everything from sleep to training and recovery and bloodwork and everything, making sure everything is dialed in and also weight wise because I know a lot of people have asked ‘has this contributed to the weight cut?’ Truthfully, I do not believe any of that was because of the weight cut.”
Since the day she signed with the UFC, Barber’s goal has been becoming champion and she’s not giving up on that just because she’s been sidelined with health problems for the past year and a half.
If anything, the time away has only made Barber grow that much more determined and she’s prepared to do whatever it takes to finally live out her dreams. And if there’s a bright side to all she’s suffered through, it’s that Barber is still just 27 and the prime of her career is still ahead.
“Trevor Wittman asked me ‘what’s your why?’ He asked me this when I was 17 I think and I could never answer that question at first because I was like I don’t know how to answer this,” Barber said. “Now I know what my why is. Despite all of the things I’ve gone through, as long as I hold onto that why, I’m going to be able to accomplish anything that I set out to. It might take me until I’m 30, it might take me until I’m 28, it might take me however long but I know that it’s something that I’m going to be able to do. It’s just one of those things, I’m just going to keep doing what I need to do and what I know is best for me and pushing forward and do the next right thing and I know that I’ll have that belt around my waist.
“This is my time to shine. This is my fight where I get to go out and get a dominant finish and a dominant win and just solidify my spot in either this fight or the next fight being my title run.”
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