Finally, 215 days after Washington Redskins QB Alex Smith left the field with a gruesome broken leg, he is opening up about the recovery process and what life has been like for the past seven months.
In a sitdown (or massage chair) interview with Angie Goff of Fox 5 WTTG-TV, Smith discussed what it was like in the first few weeks and months after the injury, which occurred Nov. 18, 2018, as well as his timetable and expectations for the future.
The two started by discussing what the last stretch of his recovery has meant to him.
“The last three months have really been life-changing, in the sense that I’ve been able to start driving now, I’m off of crutches,” Smith said while getting a massage in the mall. “The first four months were really, really hard. Just to be in a wheelchair for as long as I was. When you have independence and then lose it, that was the hardest part.”
Losing a sense of independence has to be tough, especially for a player used to traveling and being as active every day as Smith was in the league. Despite this, some people have said that he always manages to have a smile on his face through it all.
“I don’t feel necessarily that I’m always positive all the time — people have said that to me before,” Smith said. “I don’t know, I just feel like perhaps the thing that’s helped me the most with this is just trying to get through each day. It’s crazy, and it sucks what happened, but there are people out there who have it way worse. Stuff happens to everybody — life happens. I feel like this is just a time for me to obviously be tested, and have this challenge in front of me, to see how I handle it.”
It may still be a while until Smith returns to the football field, but he appears to have a good mindset about recovery and is looking forward to his eventual comeback.
