Stevie Ray was four weeks out from the biggest fight of his career when he received a phone call which made his heart sink.
The 33-year-old had just finished a training session in preparation for his Professional Fighters League (PFL) lightweight world title fight against Olivier Aubin-Mercier, in late November, when he was told his seven-year-old daughter, Myla, required brain surgery.
“I started sobbing, just crying on the mat,” Ray tells BBC Sport.
“James, my coach, came up to me straight away to ask me what was wrong, gave me a hug and told me to go home. It was really, really tough.”
In 2020 Myla was diagnosed with frontal lobe epilepsy and was prescribed medication to help with her seizures.
Ray says before her diagnosis, Myla was affected by more than 700 seizures over a two-month period, but the medicine allowed her to return to a normal life.
In October 2022 however, doctors discovered Myla suffers from Cortical Dysplasia type two which is an abnormality in the frontal lobe of the brain, and in conjunction with her becoming medicine-intolerant – something which Ray says affects only 20% of epilepsy patients – she would need brain surgery.
Only those close to Ray knew what he was going through in the run-up to the fight against Aubin-Mercier.
Ray, who is from Fife in Scotland, lost via a second-round knockout.
If he had won, he would have secured the title and a $1m [£800,950] prize but in defeat, took home only around a tenth of that sum.
“There was a lot of pressure. If I won a lot of the money was going to go on surgery and care for Myla. That was the plan. So that was the most devastating part [about losing],” said Ray.
“If you watch the video [of the fight] you can hear my wife screaming ‘do it for Myla’.
“To be honest it did [affect my preparations] but I didn’t want to tell anybody until after the fight. I didn’t want to make excuses. I got beat fair and square.”