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Ben Askren
Credit: Real American Freestyle
NEED TO KNOW
- Former UFC fighter Ben Askren is returning to the ring for a final time just one year after undergoing a double-lung transplant that saved his life
- Askren tells PEOPLE how his wife Amy convinced him to go to the hospital when he thought he was just having back spasms during their trip to Las Vegas last year
- “I’m not who I was, but I’m doing good and I’m not all that far off,” Askren tells PEOPLE ahead of his one-night-only return to wrestling on Saturday, July 18
Ben Askren wanted to go to the Bitcoin conference. He ended up getting a double-lung transplant instead.
In late May 2025, the former UFC fighter, 41, had been dealing with what he thought were “muscle spasms” — something he’s experienced “several times over the years” — so he “didn’t think too much of it,” he tells PEOPLE. “Over the course of the next couple days, I got a few chiropractic adjustments. It would periodically feel better, but then it would get worse again.”
Days later, Askren and his wife Amy attended a Bitcoin conference in Las Vegas. “I was in pain pretty much the whole flight, but I still just thought it was a back spasm. The next day, my wife convinced me to go to the hospital.”
Askren’s vitals were all fine. “Everything read normal,” he says, recalling that the doctor agreed with him it was likely a spasm and gave him medicine to treat it. “That night, everything got worse and worse, and I fell asleep eventually, but my wife was like, ‘We have to go back to the hospital.’ ”
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Ben Askren on Oct. 26, 2019 in Singapore
Credit: Jeff Bottari/Zuffa LLC via Getty
“I fought her on it,” Askren shares. “I said, ‘No, I just went to the damn hospital yesterday. I don’t want to go back to the hospital. I want to go to the Bitcoin conference. That’s what we’re here for.”
Amy, who shares three daughters with the wrestler, “convinced” him, he says. “And then after walking into the hospital, I have no recollection of anything for somewhere around 40 days.”
Askren was diagnosed with necrotizing pneumonia, “where the lungs were eating themselves,” he says. “A lot of people who get lung transplants aren’t in the hospital that long, because, of course, while they’re not healthy, they’re not deathly ill like I was and most of them have been suffering for long periods of time, but I almost died.”
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Askren spent days on a ventilator and life support while Amy shared updates on his social media and documented the days in a journal for her husband to read once he woke up.
“She took lots of videos and pictures because she knew that I was going to want to know, ‘Hey, what the hell happened?’ when I woke up,” he says, emphasizing that he thought he was “perfectly fine” before falling unconscious at the Las Vegas hospital.
“I don’t remember anything. She said I woke up and would communicate a bit, but I don’t remember any of that whatsoever,” he adds.
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Ben Askren in the hospital
Credit: Ben Askren/Instagram
Amy’s journals were “informative” once he woke up more than a month later. “When I read through it, I was like, wait, what happened? Oh my God. It’s like you’re reading a book that you don’t know and it’s like, oh wait, what really happened? When you think you’re just a healthy, 40-year-old male who has zero health problems, and then you wake up 40 days later with two new lungs, I think any reasonable person is going to say, ‘How did this freaking happen? How is this even possible?’ and I think that’s why she was documenting it for me.”
The months following Askren’s discharge from the hospital weren’t any easier. “For five or six months, I really wasn’t well enough to go places and it wasn’t smart to go places, but I didn’t want to hold my family back, so they’d go to our other kids’ sporting events or whatever, and I’d just be here alone.”
The gift of time allowed Askren “a lot of time for reflection and thinking, and digging in and reading the Bible,” he says. “I became a Christian, and I think that has helped me become a lot more patient, understanding and have a lot more empathy.”
One year later, which is “kind of a big deal in the transplant world,” says Askren, he’s doing something that “wasn’t even on my bingo card” — returning to the ring one last time. “I’m going to wrestle once and that’s it,” Askren tells PEOPLE ahead of his Real American Freestyle (RAF) match against Belal Muhammad on Saturday, July 18.
“RAF told me they were coming to Milwaukee on July 18, and I was thinking, ‘F---, that’s my birthday, I should wrestle.’”
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Ben Askren at Real American Freestyle
Credit: Real American Freestyle
“Life will never be the same as it was because I have all these new things I have to deal with, but life is still really good and I have a lot of great things going on,” says Askren, who still has a long road to recovery ahead, but looks forward to one last dance. “There’s something that just spoke to me about it being in Milwaukee on my birthday. I wanted to get my ass out there and make it happen, and show people that they can deal with hard things and come back.”
“I’m not who I was, but I’m doing good and I’m not all that far off,” adds Askren, who looks forward to continuing to do what he loves the most after his one-and-done match: “I love running my wrestling academy with my brother and my high school coach and I love being at home with my family, and that’s probably what I’ll do next.”
Read the original article on People
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