Texans star defensive end J.J. Watt detailed the arduous medical ordeal he's experienced over the past year as the injured three-time NFL Defensive Player of the Year penned a first-person piece for The Players' Tribune.
Besides undergoing a pair of microdiscectomy procedures to twice repair a herniated disk, Watt dealt with a staph infection prior to a game against the Jacksonville Jaguars in addition to three torn abductor muscles, two torn abs and a broken hand.
Watt still managed to record 17 1/2 sacks, 29 tackles for losses and 50 quarterback hits last season as he matched Hall of Fame pass rusher Lawrence Taylor by winning a third NFL Defensive Player of the Year crown.
"Believe it or not, the scariest was probably the staph infection," Watt wrote. "One Friday night last season, I noticed some weird bumps on my knee. I thought it was a rash, so I went and asked our trainer if he had any cream. He looked at my knee and said, 'That looks really bad. We have to get you to the hospital right now.' I thought he was joking at first, but then I could see in his face that he was serious and actually a bit panicked. As it turned out, he saved me in a big way. At the hospital, they immediately put me on three hours of the strongest antibiotic IVs. I went straight from the hospital to the team plane and we flew to Jacksonville.
"Once we landed, there were two more hours of antibiotics that night and two more the morning before the game. The medicine had completely drained me, but I played - and we won. I remember walking into the locker room after the game and just collapsing on the training table. My body was completely shot with nothing left to give. As the trainers hooked me up to an IV, one of the guys walking past joked, 'You alive?' Later that day on the flight back to Houston, one of the team doctors told me that if our trainer hadn't recognized the problem so quickly, I could have lost my leg."
Addressing his twice surgically repaired back, Watt wrote: "In July, I had another surgery to fix the herniated disc. Then in September, three games into the 2016 season, I had another surgery to fix the same reherniation of the same disc. I guess this was my body telling me, 'Nice try, when I pushed the pace of my return."
Watt wrote that he's spent the past few months recovering from his surgery, which was performed by Dr. Robert Watkins in Los Angeles, back in his home state of Wisconsin.
Watt acknowledged that he has thought about retirement.
"Some people started to wonder if I was done," Watt wrote. "There was a time when I genuinely wondered, 'Am I done?' I didn't feel like myself. I had never even had one major surgery before, much less three in one year. To have the game taken away from me three times, each time left to wonder if I would ever be the same again, that was hard. That was the first time the word retirement had ever crept into my head."
However, Watt made it clear he has no intentions to retire.
"Yes, over the last year, I've been through some dark times, and my body was beat up more than most people probably would realize," Watt wrote. "But I've learned that a life without adversity is a boring life to live. I've experienced the highs, and I've experienced the lows, and both are better than living in the middle. The kid in me is back. Am I done? Hell no. I'm just getting started."
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