Travis Frederick relieved to be recovering but his return remains mystery

Dallas Cowboys center Travis Frederick doesn’t yet know when he’ll be back.

But the most important thing for Frederick, however, is he knows he will be back.

The Cowboys’ All-Pro veteran spoke for the first time since being diagnosed with Guillain-Barré syndrome, an autoimmune disease that causes weakness and numbness in the extremities and, in its worst cases, affect a patient’s breathing and can cause death.

“First thing you do is Google it and when you Google it it looks like the worst thing that could happen to anybody, which in some cases it is terrible,” Frederick said.

Frederick was diagnosed relatively quickly and went through five days of IVIG treatment. He started noticing an improvement but remains far from 100 percent, let alone ready to return the football field.

“I’ve noticed some improvement from where I was at my worst time,” he said. “There was a very brief moment since the treatment started where we noticed that it got better. That was the sign that the diagnosis was correct and the treatment was correct and was working. But those changes were very small at first.”

Frederick said the expectation is that his recovery process will ramp up slowly before showing a bigger improvement and then returning to a steady but slower process towards a full recovery. He is still feeling numbness in both his hands. His recovery could last a couple of more weeks to a couple of months.

Cowboys coach Jason Garrett said Frederick is already contributing to the team by remaining with the team during his recovery.

“He’s one of the best guys I’ve ever met in my life. He’s just an outstanding person,” Garrett said. “I think a lot of what he’s able to do on the field reflects the kind of guy he is, just how he works at it, how important it is to him, the kind of teammate he is and the kind of player he wants to be. As he’s coming back from this, his involvement with our team is a reflection on the kind of guy he is.

Each case of the disease is different. Frederick is still in the beginning stage, he said. He feels pretty good, looks healthy, and if he wasn’t a professional athlete would be close to returning to work at this point. At no point was he ever unable to walk or breath normally, which are symptoms of an advanced stage or worse case of the disease.

“If I had a desk job I’d be back,” he said. “Good thing for me is we caught it early. “I was never not able to do my normal daily functions, which is very fortunate,” he said. “But I have to make sure that I’m very careful with this: Everyone’s case is very different. There are a lot of different levels of this. Mine was a very slow-moving case to start and sort of ramping up there at the end. By catching it early we cut off what would be the bottom end of this — paralysis and trouble with breathing and body control.”

Once he’s fully recovered, there is an small chance he could contract the disease again. But, as with getting Guillain-Barré in the first place, the chances are very rare.

Frederick has remained with the team and has been on the sideline during practice and doing some light workouts. But he still doesn’t have a timeline for his return.

”I wish I was lying to you by telling you that, but when Coach [Jason] Garrett tells you that this is a week by week thing, it really is,” Frederick said. “ I have some of the best doctors in the business working on this and they can’t even begin to predict how this is going to work. We’re going to see how the improvement continues and hopefully I’ll get back there as soon as I can.”

Not knowing when he’ll be back is a little unnerving, but nothing compared to not knowing what was ailing his body back in late July as training camp ramped up. He announced the diagnosis Aug. 22.

“I will tell you that I’m extremely relieved to know what’s going on,” he said. “The day that I received the diagnosis and we went through the process, it all happened very quickly, but I was very relieved to finally have an idea of what it was that was going on, because I was having some weird symptoms.”

After he started improving, Frederick felt more mental relief.

“That helped relieve some of that uneasiness,” he said. “It’s hard looking forward not knowing what’s coming as far as a recovery standpoint and when I can come back but knowing that I will get back to 100 percent at some point is certainly relieving. It’s difficult for me personally.

“For a lot of guys in this locker room, you try to push through things. When you’re injured, you try and get past it. This is something I can’t just will my way through. It’s going to require some patience and some great work from our rehab staff and our strength staff to be able to just continue to push forward and take what my body gives me so I can continue to improve as those things come back and then I hopefully I can take that bigger jump.”