mixed feelings
Hayden Grove @H_Grove
The Browns have released
Armonty Bryant, who's 4-game suspension was up this week.
#Browns
'I need a kidney': From NFL pass-rusher to dialysis in a year
Armonty Bryant wakes up every morning, gets out of bed and for most of the day can't leave his bedroom. He wants to. He would give almost anything to. He must stay.
Bryant, 28, takes four pills for his blood pressure and gets to work. It's a different job than the one he had before as an NFL defensive lineman who was drafted by the Cleveland Browns in 2013 and last played for the Detroit Lions in 2016. It's one he doesn't get paid for, but one he must complete in order to live.
He begins his arduous daily process here, starting with hanging a new bag of dialysis solution on his IV pole. For 50 minutes he sits in the San Diego bedroom he shares with his wife, Kim. He connects the solution to a catheter coming out of his abdomen. He then drains his body of the old solution that has been filtering his blood, a step that takes 15 to 20 minutes. Next he fills his abdomen with the new solution, completing a round of peritoneal dialysis. When the bag is empty, he gets up and caps it before he heads off to make breakfast and start his day.
Armonty Bryant undergoes dialysis alongside his daughter Lelani.
Four hours later, he does it again, a daily loop of fluid, waste and frustration.
Wake up. Dialysis. Breakfast. Clean up. Dialysis. Clean, read or play FIFA or NBA2K. Dialysis. More cleaning, a visitor or whatever he can handle. Kim comes home. Dinner. Dialysis. Bed. Wake up.
Repeat.
During dialysis training in November, Bryant broke down in tears. He can't work. Essentially homebound, he's able to leave only in short spurts and for doctor appointments. He must run dialysis every four hours to keep his kidneys -- or what's left of their function -- working. Kim becoming his caregiver allows him to do this at home instead of at a dialysis center.
Bryant has been diagnosed with focal segmental glomerulosclerosis, more commonly known as FSGS. The FSGS has led to renal failure, and is the reason Bryant retired last summer after parts of six seasons in the NFL. Now he waits, hopefully, for a kidney donation and transplant that could remove him from dialysis and return him to a mostly normal life.
There are times he has to pause as he describes his life over the phone last month. It's still too raw to process. As a football player, he was fighting to reach opposing quarterbacks. Now he's fighting to live. At 6-foot-4, he weighed 270 pounds a year ago. Bryant is down to 235. When people ask if he's an athlete, they reference a wide receiver or basketball player, not a hulking defensive end.
"In the beginning, I didn't even have an appetite. I couldn't eat before starting dialysis. I was eating one to two meals a day, not really even hungry," Bryant said in a particularly low moment last month. "I've lost so much weight and it's so depressing. It's not me, you know?
"Like, when I look in the mirror, I don't see myself. I see a sick person. I see a tube coming out of my stomach. I don't see Armonty Bryant."
Entire article:
http://www.espn.com/nfl/story/_/id/26047187/i-need-kidney-nfl-pass-rusher-dialysis-year
I'd never even heard of the last two fuckers.
