The Beginning
The King of MMA was born Dana Frederick White, Jr. He was born on a Monday
afternoon, on July 28, 1969 at 3:02 pm in Manchester, Connecticut. I was nineteen
years old and a high school dropout. His father, Dana Sr., was twenty-one years old
and worked in the mailroom at Pratt and Whitney Aircraft. Throughout the pregnancy,
I did not work. I had been very sick for the first seven months of the pregnancy and
actually lost weight up until the eighth month. I had nausea and vomiting that was so
severe I could rarely hold down any food and just the smell of food sent me running to
the bathroom retching all the way. At times, the vomiting became so severe I would
bring up large amounts of blood and clots and have to go to the emergency room to
stop the vomiting. My doctors never considered the possibility that my sickness was
because I was pregnant. With the weight loss, constant vomiting, and bleeding they
had diagnosed me as having a rare blood disease. When one of the doctors finally did
a pregnancy test and it came back positive, everyone was shocked and very
concerned for both my health and Dana’s.
I remember my first appointment with the obstetrician. I was sitting in the
waiting room with four other women. The women were talking with one another
asking how far along they were and when their due date was. Each of them was
between five and seven months pregnant. I glanced over to the part of the waiting
room where they had all congregated and gave them a quick once over. My first
thought was they were very large, I thought to myself “God, what a bunch of cows.
How much bigger can they get.” None of the women in the room had included me in
their conversation or asked me how far along I was, but that was probably because I
had no belly sticking out at all. In fact, my hipbones were sticking out. I was nineteen
years old and quite ignorant about being pregnant, which looking back now was a
blessing in disguise.
The doctors tried to determine how far along I might be and decided I was
probably somewhere in my seventh or eighth month of pregnancy, and I was without
any prenatal care to that point. The doctors also diagnosed me as having a rare blood