Former NFL defensive lineman Derek Wolfe revealed an injury left him temporarily “paralyzed” before he returned to the field a couple of weeks later.
“The injuries I had while I was in the NFL were out-of-control, ” Wolfe said on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast. “In 2013 I bruised my spinal cord, I was paralyzed for three hours and then I played two weeks later.”
“It was terrible, every time I got touched my arms would go numb, and I’m a defensive lineman, so my head’s getting hit every play.”
Wolfe, who spent nine seasons in the NFL with the Broncos and Ravens, said the injury occurred during a preseason game against the Seattle Seahawks.
“I was playing on the end of the line on the right side, and I was playing a cut block somebody tried to cut my legs out,” Wolfe recalled. “So I’m playing sprawled out to play the cut block and then the fullback hit me on top of the head.”
After the sequence, Wolfe, a 23-year-old at the time, remained motionless on the ground.
“I was awake, it didn’t knock me out, it felt like, you know when you’re sitting on the s—ter for too long and get up, exactly how my body felt. From the nose down,” Wolfe said.
The medical teams at CenturyLink Field, now Lumen Field, quickly rushed to Wolfe’s aide and placed him into an ambulance, transporting him to a nearby hospital.
“I couldn’t move,” Wolfe said. “I was just stuck in the ground, it was like I was melted,” Wolfe said. “I was scared, but when I could feel them touching my toes a couple of hours after it happened, I just started making jokes.”
Wolfe missed the next week’s game but was back in the lineup for the final preseason game after team doctors said he was good to go.
Wolfe suffered a seizure three months later while on the bus ride to the airport for a game against the Kansas City Chiefs, according to ESPN.
Advertisement
“12 weeks later, I was playing good football still somehow, 12 weeks later I had a seizure, like a bad seizure it almost killed me, I was in a coma for almost 36 hours,” Wolfe said.
Wolfe told Rogan he had a seizure because his bruised spine wasn’t allowing fresh blood to be delivered to his brain.
“They told me it was a stinger,” Wolfe recalled what the training staff said to him before giving him an analogy. “You know when you have a big warehouse and you flip the lights off, they come right off, but when you turn them on it takes them a while to turn back on.”
“That’s when I realized they don’t care about us,” Wolfe said about the NFL and how players need to play because there is someone ready to take their spot on the roster.
Wolfe, who won a Super Bowl with the Broncos, recently took up hunting as a hobby, being called up to hunt a mountain lion that was terrorizing a neighborhood.