The first thought Liam McCracken can remember having after he woke up was that he was glad to be alive.<\/p>\n
On Tuesday, the Briton is set to compete for a UFC contract on Dana White’s Contender Series in Las Vegas, but just three years ago he was fighting for his life.<\/p>\n
While out on a run near his home in Liverpool, McCracken stepped out into the road without properly checking for oncoming vehicles, and was hit by a bus.<\/p>\n
The 25-year-old from Liverpool says he didn’t see the bus until the last moment, and was dragged underneath it for 18 metres (60ft) and seven seconds before it stopped.<\/p>\n
A couple who saw the incident found McCracken under the bus unconscious and bleeding heavily. They thought he was dead.<\/p>\n
If not for passers by on the main road, among them a paramedic with life-saving equipment in their car, McCracken says he would probably have bled to death before an ambulance arrived to take him to hospital.<\/p>\n
The accident left McCracken with four fractures in his back, two slipped discs in his neck, three broken ribs, a broken pelvis, a broken nose, a ruptured anterior cruciate knee ligament, a torn meniscus and multiple other wounds.<\/p>\n
For a long time he worried he might never walk or compete again – but remarkably, he will fight Mexican lightweight Silvestre Sanchez on Tuesday.<\/p>\n
“For the first few days I wasn’t caring about anything else other than the fact that I was alive,” McCracken tells BBC Sport.<\/p>\n
“I have a little daughter and apparently the people who found me said that was the first thing I kept speaking about when I regained consciousness. <\/p>\n
“I kept asking about my little girl while I was on the floor getting seen by people. The main thing was I was glad to be alive.”<\/p>\n
McCracken says the incident and recovery which followed were some of the most difficult moments of his life but he tells the story in good humour.<\/p>\n
“My girl had just turned one. One of the funniest things is she wasn’t walking at the time and literally a day or two after it happened she started walking. I stopped being able to walk while she’d just learned to walk,” says McCracken.<\/p>\n
McCracken was not only unconscious but was being burned by the engine of the bus – but the driver could not turn the ignition off because the suspension would have dropped, with the vehicle potentially crushing him.<\/p>\n
A pedestrian had to help the driver guide the bus away from McCracken before anyone could tend to him.<\/p>\n
“A woman was with me holding my hand on the floor and then loads of people started coming over,” said McCracken.<\/p>\n
“They came over and saw to me straight away which basically saved my life because I was losing a lot of blood. I had to get multiple blood transfusions.”<\/p>\n
At the time McCracken had won five of his six fights as a professional and was being touted as a future UFC star, but he had a long road ahead of him if he was to make his dream a reality.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The first thought Liam McCracken can remember having after he woke up was that he was glad to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":876091,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[570],"tags":[64,63,786,785,85],"class_list":["post-876090","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-mma","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-fighting","tag-mma","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/876090","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=876090"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/876090\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/876091"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=876090"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=876090"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=876090"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}