Caleb Plant’s daughter, Alia, was born with a brain abnormality and she was plagued by seizures, sometimes several hundred a day, during her life. (Photos courtesy of Caleb Plant and graphic by Amber Matsumoto/Yahoo Sports)

Caleb Plant scoffs at the notion that he’ll be overcome by the pressure of fighting for his first world title on Sunday in Los Angeles, when he faces José Uzcátegui for the IBF super middleweight belt at the Microsoft Theater on Fox Sports 1.

He’s lived through so much tragedy and dealt with so many horrors that trading punches with another person, even one of the best fighters in the world, is a fun thing.

The golfer Lee Trevino once laughed at the suggestion there was pressure trying to win the U.S. Open. Pressure, Trevino quipped, was playing for 10 dollars with 10 cents in his pocket.

Plant could relate better than most. The ring is a sanctuary for him because of the hand life has dealt.

Five times during the all-too-brief 20 months and 23 days that his daughter, Alia Plant, spent on this Earth, doctors told her father she was about to die.

Four times, Caleb looked those doctors in the eye and said no.

“The doctors would pull me into this little white room and they had that look and they said to me, ‘OK, Mr. Plant, we want you to know that we’ve done everything that we can do, but your daughter, she’s going to wind up passing away tonight,’” Plant said. “Obviously, that’s something no parent ever wants to hear. I couldn’t accept it. I didn’t believe it. I told them, ‘No. We’ve got to figure something out. That’s my daughter. I don’t accept that.’ I was probably naive, or blind to what was going on, but I couldn’t accept it. I refused to accept it. I just didn’t think it would happen.”

The fifth time, though, was different. Alia was born with a brain abnormality and she was plagued by seizures, sometimes several hundred a day, during her life.

As he had so often done, Plant rushed to meet with his daughter’s doctors, who had once again put her on life support. Plant walked into the intensive care unit of the hospital she was in and saw his daughter, who had wires protruding from her tiny body.

It felt different when he saw her this time, however. Once again, doctors told him she was going to die. This time, somehow, some way, Plant knew they were correct. It was Jan. 29, 2015, not even two years since he celebrated her birth on May 7, 2013.

“I was so excited and so happy [when she was born],” Plant said. “I couldn’t wait to be her father.”

But she spent most of her life in and out of the hospital and in the care of doctors. She couldn’t do the things with her father that Plant had dreamed of doing.

On that fateful morning, he was alone with her in the ICU and had a talk with her.

“She was in an induced coma and I went up to her and I said, ‘Alia, are you tired of this? Do you not want to do this anymore?’” Plant said. “She’d been through so much. I said, ‘Are you tired? Because if you are, I’m not going to be disappointed in you. I’m not going to be mad at you or upset with you. I just want you to know if you don’t want to go through this anymore, I support you. I love you and your Dad’s not going to be mad at you.’”

The pressure on Plant was intense. He literally had to make a life-or-death decision on the spot: Leave her on life support and pray for a long-shot miracle or remove her and end her suffering.

He loved his daughter so much, and he looked forward to singing “Happy Birthday” and to introducing her to Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny, taking her trick-or-treating and meeting her boyfriends and walking her down the aisle when she was married.

And now, she was slipping away, and he was helpless. After agonizing thought, he’d decided to keep her on life support until his family and friends had a chance to get to the hospital to see her and say their goodbyes.

But when he spoke to her as she lay motionless in that coma, something changed dramatically.

“They’d said she’d pass sometime in that coming night,” Plant said. “So I thought it was best to keep that life support on until five so everyone who wanted to could get there. But then after I talked to her, something happened and the doctors said, ‘She’s going to pass now.’ I asked them to take all the tubes out of her and clean her up. She’d had those tubes and wires on her all of her life and I didn’t want our last memory of her to be of that. So they cleaned her up and we saw her and at 10:55 [a.m.] on Jan. 29, 2015, she passed away.”

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