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If there had been an award for "Bizarre Injury of the Year" in 2014, Demian Maia would have an extra trophy lying around at home. Maia (19-6) will return from a nearly year-long layoff by facing Ryan LaFlare (11-0) at UFC Fight Night on Saturday in Rio de Janeiro. The event will be at Maracanazinho Gymnasium. The 37-year-old welterweight missed the second half of last year due to what was ultimately diagnosed as a bone infection in his shoulder. The condition is so rare, it took physicians in Sao Paulo more than a month to identify it. At one point, during his third trip to the hospital for a recurring fever, Maia stopped thinking about his fighting career and grew worried about his overall outlook. "We didn't know what the problem was," Maia told ESPN.com. "I was in the hospital and the fever was coming back every five or six hours. They were doing a whole bunch of tests on me and everything was coming back clean, so they ordered a full body scan to see if there was a tumor or something. "That's when it got scary. I was thinking maybe I had something really serious. I started to think about my family and my kids. I was very afraid." Eventually, doctors figured out a bacterial infection was what was causing Maia's shoulder pain and fevers. He underwent an aggressive treatment of antibiotics, administered through IVs. How in the world does one come down with a bacterial infection, deep within the shoulder bone? The only possibility provided to Maia was that it entered and passed through his body through a channel created by an anti-inflammatory shot. "I had a little shoulder injury around July and got an anti-inflammatory shot," Maia said. "After I got the shot, I went to training and that's when maybe the bacteria got through all the way to the bone.
"There's no other way bacteria could get to the bone. They say it's pretty rare. It's a very small opening, but that's the only thing they believe could have happened." Now fully recovered, Maia will look to solidify and improve his welterweight ranking, starting with the undefeated LaFlare -- a former NCAA wrestler training out of the Blackzilians camp in Boca Raton, Florida. A UFC veteran since 2007, Maia fought Anderson Silva for the promotion's middleweight title in April 2010. He lost via unanimous decision in a fight that was largely forgettable outside some rather awkward behavior by Silva. UFC president Dana White was so disgusted with Silva's performance, he refused to put the championship belt on him that night. Five years later, Maia says he feels fortunate to have had that title fight experience, but it will be bittersweet if he never reaches that point again. Compared to the fighter he is now, he believes the 2010 version that fought Silva was far from title-ready. "I feel great about that but I'm a totally different fighter now," he said. "You always think about, maybe if that were today, it would be really different -- but what's happened is what was supposed to happen. I'm glad for that fight because it gave me a lot of experience." LaFlare, 31, who missed the second half of last year due to a knee injury, said Maia's experience could actually work against him in this fight. A fighter with a lot of experience is also one with a lot of established tendencies he can't get rid of. "Demian is a great fighter, but you know, he's had a lot of fights," LaFlare said. "He's 37. He's had a chance to fight for the belt. I know what he has for me. He might have picked up a few tricks along the way, but I know what he brings to the table. He doesn't know what I'm going to bring. I have so much to my game that no one has even seen yet. He's not going to be able to prepare for that."
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