NEW YORK – An allergic reaction to medication caused middleweight champion Kelly Pavlik’s temperature to soar past 104 degrees (40 C), and his heart rate to 150 beats a minute.
When he was finally admitted to the hospital, the sweat was pouring off his body, which had turned shades of red and purple.
An infectious diseases specialist at the Cleveland Clinic told his father, Mike Pavlik, that the 27-year-old fighter had better keep fighting. The outlook was grim.
“I’m not a medical man,” Mike Pavlik said, “but he was really close to the edge that day.”
What began as a small staph infection on the knuckle of his left hand, where Pavlik had received a cortisone injection, had somehow spiraled to this: A strapping young man who makes his living relentlessly pushing his body to the extreme was bedridden, his wife Samantha keeping vigil over him while doctors learned what went wrong.
Pavlik says he doesn’t remember everything that happened last month, only bits and pieces.
He recalls a doctor telling him that he wasn’t going home right away, and that every step he took toward the emergency ward was more difficult than the last. He remembers his skin crawling, his heart feeling like it would jump right out of his chest.
He doesn’t remember the steroids doctors gave him to make the reaction subside.
“I don’t remember that day, that’s how bad it was,” Pavlik told The Associated Press. “They told me it was pretty serious. It was the worst form of reaction you could have.”
It was also the lowest point in a summer of misfortune. (AP)