The Cleveland Browns’ star pass rusher, Myles Garrett, wasn’t afraid to say it: COVID-19 “kicked my butt … I was in pain.”
As the NFL rightly — and effectively — keeps tightening the screws on its pandemic-battling strictures, both at team facilities and on game days, it’s informative to hear from a couple of players at identical positions who actually became infected with the coronavirus: Garrett and Denver pass rusher Shelby Harris.
Each got hit hard by the virus, albeit in different ways.
Garrett’s infection came and went fairly quickly, by the virus’ standards. The Browns parked the 2017 No. 1 overall draft pick on COVID-19/reserve on Friday, Nov. 20 and he came off it this past Tuesday, a 12-day absence. (The league minimum is 10 for those infected.)
On Friday, Garrett told reporters in Cleveland what it was like. Bear in mind, at 6-foot-4 and 272 pounds he’s one of the most impressive athletic specimens in a league with hundreds and hundreds of them.
“I was not one of those asymptomatic cases, even though leading up to it I thought I would be,” he said. “My parents had it. It kicked their butt. I had it. It kicked my butt. Now, I am back.
“I lost my (sense of) smell for almost two weeks, had body aches, headaches, my eyes were hurting, coughing, sneezing and fever. I was in pain.”
He tried to stay in shape during those nearly two weeks, and similarly tried to lift weights, but Garrett said Browns team doctors advised him not to.
“Just because they did not know what kind of effects there would be on my heart and my lungs from having corona’,” Garrett said. “I tried to do my best to get a little bit here and there, to try to stretch so I was not so stiff when I came back. Really, I was forced to sit on the couch.”
Was Garrett worried about lingering after-effects, which we often hear about? You betcha.
He cited Buffalo Bills tight end Tommy Sweeney, who has been diagnosed with myocarditis — heart-muscle inflammation that we now know is rare in COVID-19 patients, and rarer still in elite athletes.
“That was my main worry,” Garrett said. “If my lungs are a little bit heavy, if I am tired, or if anything happens where I am out of breath, I will fight through that. But there is nothing you can do with the heart. You can’t play with that, and there is no getting around it.”
All NFL players and team personnel who come down with COVID-19 are tested thoroughly afterward for myocarditis and other possible serious lingering health conditions. To be cleared to return to practice this week, and then to be tabbed to start on Sunday at Tennessee, Garrett had to pass all those threshold tests.
Garrett said he was relieved but surprised that “nobody else in my close circle that I have been around has tested positive,” including family members and friends.
“It is just strange,” he said. “(And) I have no idea how I got it. It is kind of worrisome because I do not now if I got it here, I do no know if I got it in the game. I do not really go out to eat. I try to stay away from that and eat at home. Really not sure whether I got it at the market, picking up groceries. 2020 has been interesting. We are all just trying to carry on through that.”
In Denver, it was a full month ago that the Broncos placed defensive end Shelby Harris on COVID-19/reserve, at first just as a high-risk close contact. But he soon came down with the virus. He was reactivated only on Wednesday of this week, 29 days later.
What were the previous four weeks like for Harris, a 29-year-old in his sixth NFL season?
“Kind of long,” the 6-foot-2, 290-pounder said. “It’s been four years not missing a game, and now I’ve missed the last four. I really didn’t feel that awful that first week. I didn’t have anything wrong and I was testing negative. And my family tested positive when I was in the hotel (in self-isolation).
“Then a little bit later, I tested positive. For me, my only symptoms were I had the chills and the cold sweats for a day or two, and I was pretty much fine.
“It was really more the after-effects that kind of got to me — just like weird nerve pains and stuff that was unexplainable. I’m telling you that stuff was just crazy. I’m just happy to be back and happy to be healthy — like, really, truly happy to be healthy.”
The agonizing part, mentally, was that first week when he was in self-isolation, sequestered at a hotel, while his pregnant wife battled the virus.
“I was really concerned, obviously.”
Harris kept underscoring to reporters in Denver that his symptoms, while sick, weren’t that bad. It’s what came afterward, and that’s the message he wants to be sure gets publicized.
“The only reason I say all this stuff is because we don’t know much about COVID. We need to be open about the experiences we have, because more than likely people have been going through things that they may not realize are associated with COVID, or not associated with COVID. No one is really talking about it.
“Usually, I’m not going to get into my health problems, but I feel like with COVID and everything going on, we have to be able to talk about this stuff.”
@JohnKryk
Copyright Postmedia Network Inc., 2020
