Frederick nears end of long, scary road to recovery. But still has one final test
Travis Frederick is back with the Dallas Cowboys, but he still has one last checkup.
Next week he expects an all clear from doctors on his scary bout with Guillain-Barre syndrome, an autoimmune disease that struck him out of nowhere last July and kept him sidelined for the entire 2018 season.
“Sort of a final check in to make sure there’s no permanent damage there,” Frederick said. “We’ll go through a whole battery of tests again.”
Frederick is hoping the diligence he had during his recovery will pay off with a smoother return to the field. He won’t compete in full contact workouts until training camp because of surgery he had in January to repair a labrum injury in his right shoulder.
“It’s really a precautionary thing. I feel strong enough in the shoulder and good enough rehab I can go and do it,” he said. “But when it’s all live, you get [your body] in weird situations and if you catch it just wrong and [then] we’ve taken a step back. I think we’re just being smart.”
He’s good with the slow return, plus, Frederick thinks it’ll give him a chance to “knock some of that rust off before I’m back in there against live bullets.”
If the shoulder surgery and Guillain-Barré syndrome weren’t enough, Frederick is also recovering from an umbilical hernia, which is typically a harmless condition when the “intestine sticks out through the opening in your abdominal muscles through which your umbilical cord passed before you were born,” according to the Mayo Clinic.
“I feel good where I am in the weight room. I’ve come a really long way,” he said, but “I’m still coming back. I’m a little bit behind in the off-season lifting program compared to everybody else because they started a few weeks before.”
Still, just being back out on the practice field with the team for OTA’s feels good, he said. That wasn’t always a given when he first dealt with syndrome diagnosis last year.
“It’s a great feeling to get back out there and to just be doing some of those movements again,” Frederick said. “But just to be doing it again is something that you didn’t always expect. There was a time there we didn’t know if that was going to happen.”
This story was originally published May 29, 2019 at 10:02 PM.
