At this point in time, Washington Redskins quarterback Alex Smith is eyeing a return to the NFL, hoping that he can play football at some point again in his career.
A little over a year ago, that was an impossible thought to have. Keeping him alive was the main goal.
“Our first priority is we’re going to save his life. And then we’re going to do our best to save his leg,” a doctor said of Smith during his recovery, via ESPN.com. “And anything beyond that is a miracle.”
Considering that Smith is currently rehabbing and working to get back into good enough shape to be able to take the field again, it’s safe to say that a miracle has happened.
ESPN is set to air a documentary on Friday night, titled ‘Project 11.’ It will detail Smith’s recovery from a compound fracture in his leg that was suffered in a 2018 Week 11 game against the Houston Texans. After being carted off the field and rushed to the hospital, Smith floated in and out of consciousness as doctors tried to figure out what was wrong. The story from ESPN details his recovery, and this excerpt from his wife, Elizabeth Barry, is haunting.
They’re thinking he has a blood clot, a pulmonary embolism. Then we’re doing a cardiogram. Throughout the night, it’s test after test after test. Alex’s fever is through the roof. His blood pressure is dropping.
Everyone — the nurses, the doctors — every person is in this room and can hear me asking, “Is everything going to be OK?” They are saying, “We just need to find the root of the problem.”
Finally, we learn he has an infection.
The doctors are telling me, “He’s septic. It’s in his blood. But we don’t know what type of infection it is.”
Dr. Steve Malekzadeh, one of Alex’s trauma surgeons, comes in early the next morning. It’s Thursday, Thanksgiving Day. He would tell us later he came in because he couldn’t sleep. He knew something was off. He unwraps the bandages from Alex’s leg, even though it had been unwrapped just a few hours before. At that time, it looked normal, at least as normal as post-surgical fracture sites look.
But now his leg is black. The blisters are huge. It’s clear the infection is in his leg. It’s something I couldn’t fathom seeing in a war movie, only now it’s my husband. It’s my worst nightmare.
The rest of the story will be air on Friday night at 7:30 p.m. ET, detailing his recovery, and a potential return to football that lays ahead of him. It will be gruesome at times, and may illicit some teams for any fan who remembers that fateful day in November, but it will undoubtedly be uplifting to watch as Smith fights back and works to continue his athletic career. It may never come to fruition that he plays in the NFL again, but at this point, he’s alive and well, and everything else is just gravy.
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