The Tennessee Titans legend, who rushed for 2,006 yards in 2009, spoke about his ALS diagnosis on Good Morning America, saying doctors told him to "get his affairs in order" before he sought more aggressive treatment.
By PAUL KUHARSKY
NASHVILLE, Tenn. – It’s so confusing to see a terrific athlete, one of the fastest players of his NFL era, sharing through a speech-generating machine that he’s been diagnosed with ALS.
It’s confusing even though we’ve been taught that being strong or fast, an elite athlete in our most popular sport, says nothing for your long-term health, that it seems to make you more susceptible to the sort of terrible diagnosis like Chris Johnson just shared, or worse.
We’ve come to terms with the idea that our sports headlines include news like Johnson having ALS.
A 2019 Harvard study said that “NFL players had a nearly threefold greater likelihood of dying of neurodegenerative conditions, compared with MLB players. They also had a nearly 2.5-fold risk of dying from a cardiac cause.”
We saw a composed Johnson, with his composed wife, Brittany, talking with Michael Strahan on Good Morning America.
Clearly, though, it’s taken time to get there.
When he said, “They told us about a medication that might extend life by a few months, then they told us to get our affairs in order,” you could feel the heaviness, but also took the quick pivot with him, to more creative doctors.
“Honestly, I don’t know if you ever fully process it,” Johnson said. “At first, you’re in shock. Then you realize, you have two choices. You can give up, or you can fight. I chose to fight.”
Just over a year ago, he was picking up his seven-year-old daughter so she could blow out birthday candles. Now he can’t hold a cup.
“The life that we previously had is now a thing of the past,” Brittany Johnson said. “But we’re still hopeful.”
While we feel for Johnson, while that TV image of him with his head back, unable to speak, is hard to forget, let's work hard to remember what he told us:
“I still think the same,” he said. “…My body just doesn’t cooperate.”
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