DawgTalkers.net Forums DawgTalk Tailgate Forum Jason Taylor’s pain shows NFL’s world of hurt (article)

As America’s most popular sport encounters a liability problem … as gladiator Junior Seau kills himself with a shotgun blast to the chest and leaves his damaged brain to study … as awareness and penalties increase around an NFL commissioner confronting the oxymoronic task of making a violent game safe … and as the rules change but the culture really doesn’t … we think we know this forever-growing monster we are cheering on Sundays. But we don’t. We have no earthly idea.

Dolphins legend Jason Taylor, for example, grew up right before our eyes, from a skinny Akron kid to a future Hall of Famer, his very public path out in front of those lights for 15 years. But take a look at what was happening in the dark. He was just a few blessed hours from having his leg amputated. He played games, plural, with a hidden and taped catheter running from his armpit to his heart. His calf was oozing blood for so many months, from September of one year to February of another, that he had to have the equivalent of a drain installed. This is a story of the private pain endured in pursuit of public glory, just one man’s broken body on a battlefield littered with thousands of them. As death and depression and dementia addle football’s mind, persuading some of the gladiators to kill themselves as a solution to end all the pain, and as the media finally shines a light on football’s concussed skull at the very iceberg-top of the problem, we begin the anatomy of Taylor’s story at the very bottom … with his feet.

He had torn tissues in the bottom of both of them. But he wanted to play. He always wanted to play. So he went to a private room inside the football stadium.

“Like a dungeon,” he says now. “One light bulb swaying back and forth. There was a damp, musty smell. It was like the basement in Pulp Fiction.”

The doctors handed him a towel. For his mouth. To keep him from biting his tongue. And to muffle his screaming.

“It is the worst ever,” he says. “By far. All the nerve endings in your feet.”

That wasn’t the ailment. No, that was the cure. A needle has to go in that foot, and there aren’t a lot of soft, friendly places for a big needle in a foot. That foot pain is there for a reason, of course. It is your body screaming to your brain for help. A warning. The needle mutes the screaming and the warning.

“The first shot is ridiculous,” Taylor says. “Ridiculously horrible. Excruciating.”

But the first shot to the foot wasn’t even the remedy. The first shot was just to numb the area … in preparation for the second shot, which was worse.

“You can’t kill the foot because then it is just a dead nub,” he says. “You’ve got to get the perfect mix [of anesthesia]. I was crying and screaming. I’m sweating just speaking about it now.”

How’d he play?

“I didn’t play well,” he says. “But I played better than my backup would have.”

He didn’t question these needles or this pain, didn’t question the dungeon or the doctors. Consequences were for other people, weaker ones. There was only one time Taylor questioned the worth of what he did for a living, while crying and curled up on the pavement of a parking lot outside his doctor’s office. It was the needle in the spine that made him wonder about the price of this game, but those questions were every bit as fleeting as the soothing provided by those epidurals. He didn’t practice much in 2006 because of a herniated disk in his back, and he needed the medicine pregnant women use for labor just to get to Sundays. Taylor’s wife was helping him down the stairs as he left the doctor’s office after one such epidural, but that wasn’t the bad part. His back locked up as he tried to get in the passenger seat of their car, making him crumble.

“I started shaking on the ground,” he says. “My wife was trying to pick me up. I was in tears.”

Help came to get him back upstairs … to get another needle in a different spot on the spine. He won Defensive Player of the Year that season, believe it or not. Still tells Nick Saban that he won that award because of how little he practiced that year, keeping his body fresh from the daily ravages of the job.

“There was a period of a year and a half or two years when I couldn’t put my kids to bed,” he says. “My wife and I laugh about it. You have to bend down. I couldn’t with their weight. I would just hover. I would get as low as I could, and then drop them, and they’d bounce.”

He isn’t bragging, and he isn’t complaining. He wants to make sure you know that. He feels lucky and blessed to have done what he did. He is just answering questions matter-of-factly about the insanity of the world where he worked. It is a barbaric game, trying to be more of a man than the next man, putting your pain threshold against your muscled opponent’s, all of these competition-aholics colliding at an inhumane rate of speed.

So did he lie to the doctors?

Yes.

Did he get in that player deli line outside the trainer’s room before the game to get that secret elixir, a Toradol shot in the butt that would lubricate and soothe away the aches for three hours despite its side effects (chest pains, headaches, nausea, bloody stool, coughing up blood, vomit that looks like coffee grounds)?

Yes.

Did he think this was smart or healthy?

No.

Did he care that it wasn’t smart or healthy?

No.

Taylor was leg-whipped during a game once in Washington. Happens all the time. Common. He was sore and had a bruise, but the pregame Toradol and the postgame pain medicine and prescribed sleeping pills masked the suffering, so he went to dinner and thought he was fine. Until he couldn’t sleep. And the medication wore off. It was 2 a.m. He noticed that the only time his calf didn’t hurt is when he was walking around his house or standing. So he found a spot that gave him relief on a staircase and fell asleep standing up, leaning against the wall. But as soon as his leg would relax from the sleep, the pain would wake him up again. He called the team trainer and asked if he could take another Vicodin. The trainer said absolutely not. This need to kill the pain is what former No. 1 pick Keith McCants says started a pain-killer addiction that turned to street drugs when the money ran out … and led him to try to hang himself to break the cycle of pain.

The trainer rushed to Taylor’s house. Taylor thought he was overreacting. The trainer told him they were immediately going to the hospital. A test kit came out. Taylor’s blood pressure was so high that the doctors thought the test kit was faulty. Another test. Same crazy numbers. Doctors demanded immediate surgery. Taylor said absolutely not, that he wanted to call his wife and his agent and the famed Dr. James Andrews for a second opinion. Andrews also recommended surgery, and fast. Taylor said, fine, he’d fly out in owner Daniel Snyder’s private jet in the morning. Andrews said that was fine but that he’d have to cut off Taylor’s leg upon arrival. Taylor thought he was joking. Andrews wasn’t. Compartment syndrome. Muscle bleeds into the cavity, causing nerve damage. Two more hours, and Taylor would have had one fewer leg. Fans later sent him supportive notes about their own compartment syndrome, many of them in wheelchairs.

Taylor’s reaction?

“I was mad because I had to sit out three weeks,” he says. “I was hot.”

He had seven to nine inches of nerve damage.

“The things we do,” he explains. “Players play. It is who we are. We always think we can overcome.”

Everything is lined up to get the unhealthy player back on the field — the desire of the player, the guy behind you willing to endure more for the paycheck, the urging of the coaches and teammates, the culture that mocks and eradicates the weak and the doctor whose job it is not necessarily to keep the player healthy but healthy enough to be valuable to the team, which isn’t the same thing at all. The doctor gives the player the diagnosis and the consequences on the sidelines with in-game injuries, without the benefit of an MRI, and then the player makes a choice with the information about whether to take a pain-masking shot. And the choice is always to play.

“Damn right,” Taylor says.

You never know if all those needles — and Taylor took a lot — produce more pain. Science has linked Toradol to plantar fasciitis (the aforementioned torn tendons in Taylor’s feet), so Taylor might have been taking one painkiller … that helped create a different pain … and thus required a different painkiller. That was certainly the case after his compartment syndrome. He developed a staph infection that required that catheter to run from armpit to heart with antibiotics. He’d hook himself up to it for a half-hour a day, like a car getting gas, letting the balls of medicine roll into his body. Then he concealed the catheter in tape under his arm so that an opponent wouldn’t know he was weak. Opponents will find your weakness, At the bottom of a fumble pile, a Buffalo Bills player once squeezed the hell out of Taylor’s Adam’s Apple to try and dislodge the football. Anything you read about the PICC line catheter (peripherally inserted central catheter) Taylor used will tell you to avoid swimming or weightlifting or anything that might get it dirty or sweaty. Taylor was playing with it in for weeks while colliding in the most violent of contact sports. Doctors told him it wasn’t a good idea to play with it in. He ignored them.

The training room? Taylor hated guys who “took up residency” there, calling them “soft.” His mentor, Dan Marino, has a quote up on one of the walls in there, something about how being in the training room doesn’t make you part of the team. Taylor was proud to learn that one of his own quotes has been put up in there, too: Be a player, not a patient. So even the one solitary place designated for healing in football, the one safe haven, is literally surrounded on all sides by walls of voices telling the player to get the hell out of here.

“Would I do it all again? I would,” Taylor says. “If I had to sleep on the steps standing up for 15 years, I would do it.”

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That's insane.

The guy lost his leg because he refused to listen to the doctors.

I have had Toradol in my foot, and I can definitely attest to the fact that the shot hurt like hell. It is probably the most painful shot I have ever had. I swear that it felt like the doctor was pushing about a 3 foot needle into my foot .... somehow keeping it all in there .... and scraping it along bone and every nerve in my foot.

Even with the pain meds I take, I was still almost in tears from the pain of that shot.

I have also had Toradol for my back. It is probably the best thing for my back pain, but the effect is fairly short lived, and my doctors refuse to do more than 2 or 3 of the shots per year because of the potential side effects. (heart, respiratory, kidney, perforations to the stomach or intestines ... I can't remember which .....)

I definitely don't like that he feels that he should be able to tell other players to hurt themselves forever for the sake of a game. To put your health, and life, at risk for any job like that, is nuts. He chose to do so, and now he has lost a foot. He may wind up losing more than that as he gets older.

Worst pain I ever felt was getting a novocaine shot in my toe. I felt like it was going to explode. I can't imagine doing the things these guys do.

Mine was Toradol right into my heel.

The doctor was talking, trying to distract me ........ sprayed cold on my heel ...... then stabbed my heel with that 6 foot long needle. Like I said, I have no clue how he got that muck needle into my foot ......

I've gotten shots into my toes more times than I can count. It's not fun, but its probably infinitely better then getting one in the heel.

Im sure glad I never made it to the NFL

I dunno. I find it hard to feel sorry for someone that got paid a lot of money to do something they live to do.

Especially when everyone's seen now what happened to the Earl Cambell's of the past.

You chose to play a physical game. Deal with the after effects.

I'll be honest. Reading stuff likes this sometimes makes me question my football fandom.

I absolutely love the game. Will watch any game on TV ...with the Browns always taking a priority, of course. We have a no travel policy in my home from Sept - Jan....true story. I'll sometimes cave on the Browns bye week. But stuff like this ... as well as the rampant PEDs in professional football ... we all know that's true ... make me sometimes think it's not worth it for the players or the fans.

That was a terrible read. I realize he's not asking for sympathy and clearly stated he'd do it again. But I have a hard time reconciling something I love so much with something that causes so much damage.

Tough read.

True. It's not as if the risks are unknown, though, especially in this day and age.

I feel more for the average joes who will play hurt and put themselves at risk just trying to become #53 on the roster.

So wait. Did he actually have it amputated?

Half the stories I've seen online say he "almost" did.

And even in this one he says the worst part was "I had to sit out three weeks"

Plus my bro said he just saw him on tv (behind a desk mind you) but they never mentioned it.

He played 3 additional years in the NFL after the year with the Redskins, so I think it's safe to his leg was not amputated.

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The way I read what the article was saying was if he had waiting another two hours he would have lost the leg.

" Two more hours, and Taylor would have had one fewer leg."

If he knowing joined this profession and stated he'd go through all the pain again if he had the chance....there's NO way I'm feeling sorry for his plight (I realize, he wasn't asking for sympathy). And it doesn't matter how much he got paid. Good read though.

To me, this is one half of the injury story. The other, which isn't related, is the effects on the brain. When most respond to both, they'll say, "the players knew what they were getting into when they joined the NFL." I'd argue that a large majority understand Taylor's story...and expect it. I would bet most weren't aware of the effects of repeated brain injuries, CTE and what's happening to the heroes of the past (and sometimes very recent past).

Now, it's it the NFL's fault about raising awareness? I think they carry some amount of blame...especially if they knew about the brain trauma and tried to cover it up.

But again, as far as knee, shoulder and hand injuries.....I think almost everyone knows if you go into professional football, this is your future.

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I'll be honest. Reading stuff likes this sometimes makes me question my football fandom.

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me too.

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If he knowing joined this profession and stated he'd go through all the pain again if he had the chance....there's NO way I'm feeling sorry for his plight (I realize, he wasn't asking for sympathy). And it doesn't matter how much he got paid. Good read though.

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I agree, but do you really want people mutilating their bodies for your enjoyment and viewing pleasure? There is something extremely sadistic in that... and I do it too, so don't think I'm just passing some kind of judgement on you because its all of us, thats why we are here on this site...

...of course, this might have been one of the reasons the games were so long:

LINKY
When recapping the weekend that was in the NFL, I failed to point out one obvious thing: There was so much freaking action on the field over the past 48-ish hours, and it was truly a great weekend of football.

There's a correlation to this great football too: It was the highest-scoring playoff weekend in NFL history (as long as you're not the type of jerk who wants to count an eight-game weekend in 1982).

So, yeah, hope you took the over in all the games (in, um, your, uh, imaginary over-under pool that's for fun and not for money).

Denver and Baltimore blew their over-under of 46 out of the water early and finished with 73 points. But it still wasn't the highest-scoring game -- the Packers and 49ers combined for 76 between the two though it was a blowout.

Sunday had plenty of action as well, with the Seahawks and Falcons scoring 58 total and the Texans/Patriots combining for 69 points in the capper.

This weekend was one of the most exciting weekends in football we've seen in a while, and scoring, duh, was a big part of it. When there's not much scoring, football is less exciting.

Defensive games can still be great, but a high level of proficiency on the offensive end -- or at least a bunch of insane things happening to create touchdowns -- is much more valued by football enthusiasts. The NFL knows this, and it's why rules have changed to make offenses more productive.

We saw those offenses -- and those insane plays -- on display this past weekend at a never-before-seen clip. Which is precisely why it was one of the best weekends of football we've had in a long time.

Most of the games were exciting. And the ones that weren't, they had very high-profile teams in them. But man, each game seemed to be 5 hours long.

I'm sure the ratings were through the roof too.

Oh well.

I'll say that if there's anything that's going to hurt my "fandom", it's the rules changes that are making the game "less" violent. Protecting QBs to an extreme, changing the kickoff rules, punishing DBs who hit "defenseless" receivers.

Believe me, I understand why it's being done, and it's hard to argue with wanting the players to be safer.

But football is a violent game. You start taking some of that away, and it's just not the same. It would be like severely limiting body-checking in hockey. You have to yell out the guy's name or something first.

JMHO

As much as the NFL is saying its to protect the players future and guard against potential lawsuits, it's 90% about keeping the current stars on the field.

You can't sell a Pats/Ravens AFCCG if Brady, Flacco, Rice, Suggs, Gronk and Welker are out nursing injuries.

Sure, there is a certain about of roughness expected in football. But a few of the injuries occuring every week are due to late hits, helmet-to-helmet spearing, blindside diving at a defensive players knees, etc. There are things that can be cleaned up to increase the chances that the players stay on the field. Meaning, legislate out the dirty stuff.

Maybe you like the dirty stuff....sure, that's fine. But the owners don't like it when they have $100 million invested in their QB and a DT just dove at his knees 2 seconds after he threw the ball (or blasting a WR in the head that's laying out for a 12-yard catch).

There is a line that the owners/league need to find to keep the players healthy and on the field as well as keeping the fans happy with the violence. They have to adjust and so do we.

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There is a line that the owners/league need to find to keep the players healthy and on the field

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It's weird to me that the players union is typically very silent on this issue.. I mean I guess I get it, they represent the guy doing the hitting and often defend him when fines come down and they also represent the guy getting hit and fighting for his interests too...

But the players union walks a fine line on the player safety issue and I'm not sure their silence is the best approach because the players playing today will be the players suing the NFL 10-20 years from now... so who/what exactly is the players union protecting? Doesn't seem to me like they are protecting the long term interests of the players or the league.

I think the difference lies in what people consider "dirty." Good solid hits on a WR coming across the middle doesn't automatically qualify as "dirty" to me.

Exactly, even without the safety precautions put in place, people would go into coal mines or work in dangerous factory conditions if the money was right, but we still don't allow them to.

Eventually the "They know the risks" and "We compensate them well" arguments aren't going to be enough... And if the NFL doesn't take a very proactive approach to fixing it, eventually somebody will fix it for them.

we'll get used to watching flag football after the first few seasons

Don't mistake me stating what I think will happen with what I want to happen...

My primary point is that if the NFL does not appear to be making a good faith effort to fix the injuries, especially the lifelong debilitating ones, then congress will step in... not because they should, but because they can... and we will have a debacle that will make the baseball steroid hearings look like a well run business meeting.

yes, i understood and agree. and i think the NFL is not doing enough right now. they are focusing on the head injuries because it became the main topic of conversation, but the overall masking of injuries will creep up at some point as well (along with the lifelong addictions they can lead to).

Sooner or later robot's will replace football players and this injury stuff will be a thing of the past, no more need to talk about how players get paid well to get injured.

It wouldnt be the exact same game but instead of drafts and GM's we will be talking about who has the best R&D guys. And they can play 2 seasons per year.

well, you still would have the human factor as you could go Real Steel style and still have the guys on the sidelines (or in the locker room w/ live feeds) doing the actions and the robots just take on the collisions.

Nah, it'll just be Madden tournaments. That is, until someone sues them because the training camp for Madden may lead to obesity, diabetes and high blood pressure.

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Sooner or later robot's will replace football players and this injury stuff will be a thing of the past, no more need to talk about how players get paid well to get injured.

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I bet our robot QB still sucks.

what about: well, we've been rooting for robotic QBs for years, so we might as well take the next step.