Patriots offensive lineman Calvin Anderson is expressing gratitude to the doctors and nurses who saved him from a potentially fatal bout with malaria.
Anderson, now 28, contracted the disease after going on a charitable trip to Nigeria last summer, and at one juncture, was given a 50-50 shot at survival.
“I’m grateful for this staff,” Anderson told the Boston Globe on Thursday as he returned to Newton-Wellesley Hospital to thank the caregivers for treating him during the week he was hospitalized.
“I recognize their faces and think back to the first time I saw some of them, and I was in a much different mental state. But I’m really, really grateful they could bring me from where I was [and] back to feeling good.”
Anderson, now in his second year in New England, credited his wife, Sherée, who was on the Africa trip with him, for urging him to seek medical help when he woke up on a morning last July with a 105-degree fever — and not relenting when he sought to rest it off.
“I was thinking, ‘We have training camp coming up. I don’t have time to be sick,’” he said. “I told my wife I’m going back to sleep. ‘I’ll sleep it off. I’ll be fine.’
“But luckily, she trusted her intuition. I wouldn’t be here if she didn’t.”
Anderson spent his first three years in the NFL with the Broncos.
He was able to stave off his sickness with enough time to return to the gridiron last season, as he appeared in five games for New England with two starts.
This was a far cry from his time in the hospital, when he feared for his life.
“There was one night in the hospital where I told my wife I didn’t know if I was going to make it to the next day. The fever is so significant it’s just hard to think past how you’re feeling in the moment,” Anderson said. “But I did make it here and I did get healthy and I’m a much stronger, more resilient person now.
“So the truth is that I made it through all of that, and I’m grateful I did.”