I believed that if I couldn't play football, then life as I knew it was over. What I was in was a kind of death spiral. If something has crushed your dream, do you find yourself in denial? My own experience was that I didn't even think there was life after the NFL, so I hadn't even reached denial yet. Here are four things to help you recover should it happen to you: 1. What did I learned from my own crushed dream? Plenty. It had been my experience that most athletes are ill prepared, if not completely clueless, about the emotional and psychological impact of sustaining an injury, then trying to recover from it. My life was shattering my dreams and goals were falling like shards of glass. I was consumed with anxiety and fear and slid into the deepest depths of darkness. While I waited to see the specialist back in Chicago, I had an extremely hard time sleeping and focusing at team meetings. But, that day, my performance was not uppermost in my mind All I could think about was that excruciating pain - and the all-too-real possibility that my promising football career had just ended before it began. Still, I toughed it out, finishing the game with six tackles and a tackle for loss. The pain was so intense, I thought I might faint. I felt sick to my stomach as the searing pain worsened progressively every second. I attempted to stand - and realized that what had seemed like a routine play was not routine at all: A sharp pain stabbed through my entire leg.
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