On Monday night the Detroit Lions started a new series called Beyond. Lions defensive lineman Levi Onwuzurike penned an article and detailed a lot of what's been his career thus far. The one thing that obviously stands out the most is that Onwuzurike noted that he had spinal fusion surgery. 

The exact surgery that Onwuzurike had was an L5 S1 fusion. Basically what this surgery does is they remove the entire L5 S1 disc and then stabilize the spinal bones together with hardware. It's a surgery that can absolutely change your life. trust me, I know. 

In 2015 I started to feel this weird pain in my hips. A pain I never felt before. It felt like my my hips were plugged into the wall or something. Like electricity was shooting through them. 

I didn't think much of it at all. On Christmas morning I woke up in extreme pain. That electric feeling from my hip began shooting down my leg. It hurt so bad that I couldn't even stand up. If I did standup, it felt like my calf was literally going to explode. It felt liek that scene from Alien when the alien bursts out of that dudes chest. I thought an alien was going to burst out of my left calf.

I'd felt sciatic pain before. Usually you can just get through it. This was so much different and it just would not go away. The only time I felt any sense of relief was when I was laying down felt on the wood floor. The relief was a short at that. I'd have to like do this wiggle on the floor thing to try to massage it and make the pain go away again. I know exactly what Onwuzurkie is talking about with the marble thing. 

I had an MRI and it turns out that my L5 was completely shattered. Turns out that fall down the stairs of our front porch was  lot worse than we had thought. A piece if the L-5 had shattered in such a way that it was clamped down on my sciatic nerve. It needed to be surgically fixed. 

The problem is that I had to wait four months. That's four months of excruciating pain. I laid on the couch or the floor for four months. I couldn't sit because it hurt too much and I couldn't stand because it hurt even more. My leg muscles atrophied, I went a little crazy and depression definitely set in. 

Once I had the surgery, then came the hard part. I thought I couldn't walk before. Now it's tiny little baby steps up and down the driveway. This isn't a surgery where you're back in the gym in a few months. This is learning to use your body in a new way. This is essentially a new life. 

It's no secret that I'm not an athlete, but I do try to take care of myself. Getting back into the gym was not easy. Trying to run was a bitch. You feel every single strike of your foot in your lower back. I still feel it today when I try to run. I have to run on the grass to limit that pain. 

I had to completely change the way I lift. There's some exercises I just can't do anymore. Like leg lifts. Forget about it. You feel everything. Eventually I was able to get myself to a place where I was in better shape than I was before the injury. But it took time to learn how I could do that. 

I'm just a regular guy. Now imagine if I had to go through all of this and my job requires that I work out extensively every single day, I have to push around another human being while other human beings crash into me. It feels lie it would take a miracle.

What Levi Onwuzurkie is doing requires so much hard work and so much trust in yourself and your body. This is as much a mental thing as it is a physical thing. From the mental side I know that I'm constantly worried about my back. I worry about everything down to thinking about whether or not the screws are going to come undone somehow. To think about playing football and mastering a playbook on top of that would be like trying play that one really hard song from Guitar Hero on expert level while Shawn Michaels repeatedly kicks me in the face. 

Onwuzurkie is a special cat for doing this. It's extremally rare and as someone who went through a similar situation, I can't help but be proud of him for sticking through it and making his way back to the game. I hope he balls out this season. 

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