“Thank you,” Anderson said upon his arrival. “My dad is a physician and I have great respect for the amount of preparation you all put in to be able to take care of me when I was in a situation where I didn’t know how I was going to get through to the next day. I’m super grateful. Thank you for being there when I couldn’t be there for myself.”
Last year, Anderson was supposed to be getting ready for training camp, but his wife Sherée noticed something was off with her husband.
He wasn’t feeling well, but wanted to push through to prepare for the football season. Every day, Anderson would do 100 push-ups as a ritual, but when she saw him struggle with even that, she knew he wouldn’t get help on his own. She had to take matters into her own hands.
It took convincing, but Sherée and Anderson’s father – a doctor back home in Texas – finally got him to get checked out. Only then did Anderson realize how dire his situation was.
“Sherée effectively saved his life because he came in at just the right time,” said Dr. Harry Schrager, who specializes in infectious diseases at the hospital.
“His organ systems were stressed and ready to get worse. Malaria moves quickly, especially the malaria found in West Africa, and when someone is young and healthy and hasn’t had these types of experiences, they aren’t expecting a life-threatening illness. They think it’s the flu or a bad diarrhea. His illness presented somewhat atypically, so he owes her quite a bit, and we’re fortunate that she had good sense and made the right decision.”
Even at the hospital, things got worse before they got better.
One night, Anderson even admitted to his wife that he didn’t know if he would make it through the night. With such a significant fever, it was hard to think past how he felt in that moment.
It was also a challenge for the hospital staff to ensure the offensive lineman was consuming enough calories — not only to recover, but to also return to the football field when it was all said and done.
“It’s one thing taking care of the issue at hand – in this case the infection which was quite serious,” said Dr. Eleanor Paglia, another member of his care team.
“But then there’s this other aspect of caring for the entire person. It didn’t even dawn on me initially that for an elite athlete who is in such prime physical shape, the amount of calories and protein he needed was completely different than everyone else I’m taking care of. Once again, Sheree was a great advocate and she called me back to the room and said this had to be fixed. The kitchen wasn’t able to accommodate the amount of calories he needed. We had to think out of the box, get nutrition involved, and call on the hospital to ensure he had no restrictions. It was eye-opening.”
Sherée added, with a laugh, that “the kitchen thought I was running some kind of scheme.”