Coming Back Stronger (12 page)

Things weren’t just coasting from that point on, though. I had my good days of rehab and throwing and those days when my arm would ache and fatigue very quickly. It was obvious that my shoulder still needed a lot of work. Because of my injury, Brittany and I had made the hard decision to put off having children for now. Brittany’s main objective was to take care of me and nurse me back to health. She stayed with me the whole time in Birmingham and would jokingly say, “I’m not ready to take care of two babies.” It was tough to put that dream on hold, though.

Adding to our stress level was a move to a new city. We’d felt displaced for some time already after living with Brittany’s parents in Birmingham for the rehab. We felt a little like we were being tossed around on the waves, and we wanted to get settled, to find a place that felt like home.

We did find a house to call home in New Orleans, and we loved it. But like most older homes there, it was going to take a lot of work and TLC. The house was in the Uptown neighborhood, a little north of the Mississippi River and one block off St. Charles, next to Audubon Park and Tulane University. Many of the homes there were built in the 1800s and are listed in the National Register of Historic Places. We chose that area because it was in the heart of the city, right in the thick of things. We wanted to embrace this community the way it had embraced us, so we decided to immerse ourselves in a neighborhood full of the culture and charm of the city.

The home we bought had about $50,000 worth of roof damage from Katrina that the owner had fixed before we arrived. The floodwaters had stopped about six blocks away, but almost all the houses in the area—even those that didn’t have flood damage—were affected by the Category 5 hurricane. With any older home in the historical district, you have to deal with certain issues. Ours had been built in the late 1890s or early 1900s. It had suffered some damage from the storm, but there were also general repairs and renovations needed simply because of its age. We had a lot to accomplish to bring this house to life.

This wasn’t just a dream for Brittany and me. Yes, we wanted to put down roots in this place. But we also were hoping to show the community that we were committed to the rebuilding process. Whether you live there or are just passing through, people see these old homes as part of the fabric of New Orleans. We wanted to get our hands dirty and let everyone know we were on board with the restoration, doing our part to bring the city back better than it had ever been before. When you move into a historical district like the Garden District or Uptown or Old Metairie or the French Quarter, you feel a sense of responsibility to be a great steward of the community and to leave whatever you touch better than the way you found it.

We had planned for the renovation to take about eight months, which would have mirrored my projected comeback. Unfortunately, eight months stretched into eighteen—and then went even longer. We ended up spending two years on construction and rebuilding, and it was a long, grueling process. But we considered ourselves lucky. It was certainly nothing compared to what the folks whose homes had been destroyed went through. Many people had to evacuate the city they loved and were living elsewhere or were still living in temporary trailers the size of a closet. At least we had a roof over our heads and running water, despite the plastic coverings on the walls and the construction dust in the air. We actually spent the first six months in the house with no furniture—we slept on a mattress on the floor and ate dinner off TV trays while sitting in beach chairs. But with each new project we poured ourselves into, Brittany and I bonded more with this city. We were building something beautiful, one nail at a time.

In the first several months of my rehab, I had been incredibly antsy to pick up the ball and toss it around. I knew I couldn’t do that, but it was a great temptation. Now that it was finally time for me to start throwing again, I knew I wasn’t going to simply pick up the ball one day and have everything back to normal. I had to start over. Completely. From the mechanics to the muscle memory, I needed to relearn how to throw a football. That might sound funny coming from a guy who had a football at the end of his arm most of his life, but it was true. Throwing the football, and even holding it, felt foreign to me at first.

Throughout my rehab, I had tackled all my goals with enthusiasm and a positive mind-set. With the accomplishment of each short-term goal, I gained the confidence and strength I needed to pursue the next challenge. I had worked my way out of the sling, I had gained the full range of motion in my shoulder, and I had pushed myself as hard as I could without reinjuring my arm. I had followed all of Dr. Andrews’s advice, spurred on by Kevin Wilk’s tenacity to get me ready.

The fear of failure was always in the rearview mirror chasing after me, forcing me to push myself further than I had ever gone before. I wore my Saints shirt to rehab at the start of every week as motivation—a reminder of how much New Orleans had invested in me. I could not let them down.

My first toss was not with a full throwing motion. Nobody on the medical staff would let me do that—they knew better. My first pass was more of a pushing motion, like a shot put. I held the ball in front of me with both hands, like I was in my set position and ready to throw, and then I just pushed it to Kevin. Simple. Sort of like when you are throwing a ball to a little kid, very gently. It wasn’t strenuous at all. The feeling of throwing again was exhilarating, but at the same time the fear that tiny bit of motion brought was overwhelming.

Oh, man, I need to be so careful, I thought. I’d better not hurt myself.

Though my mind was strong and the rest of my body was in good shape, that little push let me know how weak I truly was. It confirmed how much damage had been done to my shoulder. Dr. Andrews was right—it wasn’t healed yet.

Kevin and I would work for eight or nine hours each day going through different strengthening exercises. Looking back, I think he used the football as a carrot. If I successfully went through all the rigors of my exercises, we would head outside, where there was a small patch of grass about as big as a dining room carpet. It was a rather humbling experience to have people watching as they walked in and out of the building. Here I was, an NFL quarterback, tossing a football back and forth toddler style. Kevin would underhand a pass to me, and I’d push it back to him. Some people knew who I was and had heard what I was going through. Still, I’m sure they had no idea how difficult that little push with the football was for me. It looked like something a baby could do, but it took everything I had right then.

That was such a picture of where I was compared with where I wanted to be. My desire was to walk back into a huge stadium with one hundred yards of turf, but I was on a tiny patch of grass on the lawn of a hospital building. Still, I was seeing progress. One small step at a time, I reminded myself. Trust the process.

I remember standing on the lawn of the rehab clinic one day, looking down at that little patch of grass. I’d played in the Rose Bowl. I’d been to the Pro Bowl. I was a quarterback in the NFL. And yet in that moment I couldn’t have been more thrilled about throwing a football five yards. It might not have made sense to anyone else, but to me it was exhilarating. I finally had the ball back in my hands again.

Gradually I moved from just shot-putting the ball to lifting the ball up to my right side and then pushing it. Occasionally Kevin would let me throw the ball a few times, and I would start to feel really good. I would think, Man, the shoulder is really coming back. This is great! That’s when I’d try to stretch it out a little and take the ball back a bit farther. Suddenly I would feel it—this pain deep in the tissue. It screamed out, Not yet! I had to listen to that voice many times and fight the urge to rush the recovery process.

Anyone who has played sports at any level will tell you that you can’t focus on the bad things that might happen in a game or you won’t be able to function properly when you are in the moment. When you climb into a NASCAR vehicle or strap on a helmet in a hockey game, you can’t worry about crashing or getting hurt. You must be able to relax and compete aggressively while approaching the game with great confidence. It is the fear of failure that drives you, but it is visualizing success that gives you the positive mind-set and confidence to feel like you can accomplish anything. In the end, when you know you have given everything you have and poured out your heart for the cause, then you can relax and let God take over. All God wants is for you to utilize the talents and abilities he has given you—to be the best you can be and to reach your full potential. All you have to do is give him the credit in return.

Early in my rehab, the threat of reinjury was real, and I had to be careful. Something as simple as slipping in the shower or accidentally twitching while I slept could potentially damage the repair. Even when I began the throwing process, I had to take it one step at a time and gradually ramp up the throwing motion so I wouldn’t shock the shoulder too much. There was a balance to it all. As my physical therapist, Kevin helped me learn to listen to my body and figure out the difference between good pain and bad pain. There is the good pain of stretching and gradually breaking up the scar tissue from the surgery, and then there is the bad pain of your body telling you not to go any further or you will get hurt again. It takes wisdom and experience to know the difference. Kevin had that, and I was gradually catching on.

At that stage of the rehab, when I was ready to relearn the mechanics of properly throwing the ball, I was really cautious. I would constantly ask Kevin, “How far can I take it back? How hard can I throw?”

He was infinitely patient with me. When we began, he said, “We’re going to throw ten balls at five yards.” It was a meager start, but it felt so good to be able to have a tangible goal for the day, to hold the ball in my hands again.

Before we went out to the little patch of grass in front of the building, I visualized everything about those short passes. I would picture my mechanics, the proper way to throw, what position I wanted the ball in, my stance, my release point. Slowly all those things that were once automatic started to come back.

“Okay, today we’re going to throw twenty balls at five yards,” he said the next week. The progress felt good, even though someone walking by might not notice the improvement.

Dr. Andrews had been right about recovery taking time. I learned some valuable lessons about the healing process during rehab. It’s not an overnight proposition—take a pill, do a few exercises, and everything will be fine. Even though I was able to accelerate the process a little by working hard, there was no substitute for time. There are no shortcuts to healing. You can’t rush it.

Whether you’re talking in terms of the physical, the emotional, or the spiritual, healing has its own timetable. When there is tragedy in your life—perhaps a health crisis or the death of a family member or something else that upends your world—there’s a mourning period you have to go through in order to cope with it and come out on the other side healthy and mentally whole. You have to work through the emotions and deal with the fallout. God has designed our bodies and hearts to need rest and recovery when we’ve been wounded, and you can’t rush that. In a way, it’s like the agonizing wait of pregnancy. In order for there to be proper growth for the child inside, you have to give it time. There’s no way around it.

The city of New Orleans learned that lesson in the days and weeks following Katrina. One of the worst things you can do when you’ve been laid low is to try to come back too quickly. You have to see the truth about your situation and accept it in order to heal right and then return stronger. You need to learn the lessons while you’re still down in order to put yourself in the position to make a comeback.

Everything in me wanted to rush through my rehab, and I do think my motivation helped me to get on track as quickly as possible. But I’m thankful there were people who knew more than I did about the healing process. They taught me that you have to embrace the pain in order for it to have the desired effect. The painful things we go through have a way of teaching us things we can’t learn any other way. Pain is a gift I sure didn’t want, but I believe God used it for a purpose in my life.

The last part of the rehab process focused on being able to take the ball back and extend my arm as far as necessary to throw it with full velocity. Of course I wasn’t throwing the ball that hard then, but just getting the shoulder in that position was a large feat in itself.

Here’s a glimpse of the throwing action in slow motion: after your arm pushes the ball backward away from the body into what I call the loading position, it then takes great strength and force to bring your hips and shoulders around to throw the ball. This requires a lot of external rotation in the shoulder as well as torque on the arm as it goes back and comes forward. Then, after you release the ball, the arm decelerates quickly, which requires a very strong group of muscles on the back side of the shoulder to slow the arm down. If you lack strength in the back side of the shoulder, it really limits how hard you can throw the ball. Your back-side shoulder strength must match up with your front shoulder strength, or you have created an imbalance.

The problem with an imbalance is that you are only as strong as your weakest link. If the muscles in the front of your shoulder say you can throw one hundred balls but the muscles in the back of your shoulder will only allow you to throw fifty balls, you will only be able to throw fifty balls. On top of that, the imbalance makes you more susceptible to injuries down the road. Picture the muscles as a wall of protection for the shoulder. You have already built a strong wall in the front of your shoulder, but all you have is a picket fence of muscles protecting the back. That’s why so much of the focus of my rehab involved regaining strength in the most neglected areas and the muscles that atrophy the quickest, like the back side of the shoulder.

In the beginning of the rehab process, I was hardly bringing my arm back at all. After throwing just ten balls five yards, my arm was exhausted. But with each day, each throw, I started gaining strength and momentum. There was a surprising silver lining that came in the midst of this. In relearning how to throw the ball, I was able to tighten up my mechanics by shortening my release. This allowed me to get rid of the ball quicker and with more velocity than I had before the injury. My windup became more compact. I could hit a target more quickly. And in the NFL, that kind of timing can be the difference between a pass that threads the needle and one that gets intercepted.

As I continued to work with Kevin, we graduated from the patch of grass in front of the building to the parking lot. We threw for longer distances, and I increased the velocity. The risk of reinjury was slowly dissipating, but I had to continually remind myself to focus on the correct mechanics of the throw rather than the length of the throw. It really felt good to be able to extend my arm and get more rotation in my shoulder.

I wasn’t all the way there yet, but I was on my way back.