And this is how you make a man-gina.

MMAWeekly has posted about Cole Escovedo’s comeback fight this Friday. The former WEC champ steps in against Michael MacDonald on the prelim card of the Palace Fighting Championships. While this may seem like a boring little ditty about a fighter you thought retired three years ago, it is notable because Escovedo has overcome some obstacles the past few years. Obstacles like paralysis. From a staph infection.

Yeah.

MMAWeekly gives us the medical definition of staph (aka, staphylococcus aureus):

Medical Definition: Staphylococcus is a group of bacteria that can cause a multitude of diseases as a result of infection of various tissues of the body. Staphylococcus is more familiarly known as Staph (pronounced “staff”). Staph-related illness can range from mild and requiring no treatment to severe and potentially fatal.

If you’ve never seen pictures of staph infection, I have provided a wonderful link here. At least he has someplace to store his snacks now. So after Escovedo’s fight against Antonio Banuelos over two years ago, he got a staph infection on his arm that spread to his spinal cord and paralyzed him for a while. Call me a cynic, but if an infection on your arm has time to spread all the way around to your spinal cord, it might be time to at least shop around for a new doctor. Here’s a description about the infection from Escovedo himself:

“You know butterflies and moths when they do that whole cocoon thing? It basically did that. (The infection) basically did that and it cocoon shelled around my spinal cord and kind of started to eat (the spinal cord) and left me paralyzed for a while.”

Gross. But now the Apache Kid is back and ready to rock the cage again. Luckily, he has learned a valuable lesson from this:

“I’m really big on the whole cleanliness thing now. I train twice a day and in between training sessions I’ve got like a foam body care thing that I got from a buddy of mine from a grappling tournament. It’s just a foam cleansing sanitizer that I rub on my body that kills any staph, fungus, anything on my skin from training and sweating; kills it on contact.”

See, Kids, it pays to wash your hands and wipe your ass. Otherwise, you end up with a flesh-eating infection or worse, on youtube with poo stains like the guy below.