"When [former featherweight champion] Heather Hardy retired, it was not because she wished to rest on her laurels, nor, for that matter, because she wanted to retire at all. In early 2024, she was training for a bare-knuckle boxing bout when she suddenly lost her vision. When it didn’t return for several days, she saw an ophthalmologist, who informed her that the problem was not just with her eyes, it was with her brain. She then dropped out of the fight, she announced, because she 'had too much brain damage.' Media outlets reported her permanent retirement shortly after that. Today, Heather lives with chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) and frontal lobe damage. She has daily seizures, convulsions, and muscle spasms. Her vision is impaired, she cannot sleep, she cannot read maps, and she frequently cannot distinguish right from left. She suffers from debilitating anxiety, for which she takes medication. She is 43. Heather supports herself at a subsistence level by coaching other boxers—at least for a couple of hours a day, before her brain damage symptoms become incapacitating—at the very Brooklyn gym that was her own professional haven for many years. Yet, in perhaps the cruelest development among many, and despite being a former world champion boxer, she cannot afford the kind of private health insurance that would give her even a minimally appropriate level of treatment. Instead, she relies on Medicaid for whatever minimal treatment it provides for her physical, neurological, and psychological symptoms."