Donald Cerrone has revealed how doctors had to pump water into his intestines to unravel them after a motorcycle accident just a few weeks before his fight with Jeremy Stephens on May 15.

“I was racing some motocross and I wrecked real bad and just kind of spilled my guts out,” Cerrone told Sherdog this weekend. “They had to take a bunch of my intestines and part of my stomach. What happened this time is, my stomach basically rolled around the intestine. Man, talk about pain. It was like someone was stabbing me.

“Oh, it was so brutal. I had to go to the ER, and basically they had to empty all of my intestines out and then rush water down my stomach and try to get it to unspin, kind of like a garden hose. If you have a kink in the hose, you run water and the pressure will cause it to unravel. It worked, so thank God.”

Cerrone – who trains under Greg Jackson in Albuquerque, New Mexico – was advised by his coach to pull out of the Stephens bout but he refused, saying that he would surely have recovered by the time the bout came up.

“Greg and Leonard [Garcia] were like, ‘Dude, you’ve got to pull out of the fight,’. I was like, ‘Hell no. The fight isn’t for like two weeks. I’ll be fine by then,’” Cerrone related. In the event he was able to take a unanimous decision win over Stephens and now stands 5-1 in the UFC.

He has been linked with lightweight title contention but a loss to Nate Diaz in his last outing derailed the campaign slightly and means he will need another couple of wins before he can find himself being linked with a title shot once again.