Philadelphia Eagles training camp should be the happiest place on Earth today, but it’s hard to focus on being a welded-together Dream Team who will be just as successful and beloved as the Miami Heat when one of your defensive tackles suddenly collapses and convulses on the ground for four minutes. Via a report from Shutdown Corner, by way of Philly.com:
According to Philly.com, Patterson started shaking violently and fell to the ground just as the defensive linemen were getting ready for one-on-one drills. Head coach Andy Reid was nearby and started yelling for the medical staff. Patterson fell to the ground and was unconscious for a short time before regaining consciousness and starting to move his extremities. It took an ambulance about 10 minutes to get to the scene — in the interim, rookie first-round guard Danny Watkins(notes), who’s been a volunteer firefighter for years, helped the team’s medical staff attend to Patterson. Watkins helped Patterson onto a stretcher, and the ambulance left for Lehigh Valley Hospital about five minutes later.
During the time that Patterson was on the ground, several teammates were obviously and visibly upset — kneeling, holding hands, praying, and crying.
Apparently those tears and prayers worked, because Patterson sent the Eagles public relations team a text reading “I’m cool.”
Probably not the best choice of words when your brain started f**king up in severe heat and made you go to the hospital to be treated for dehydration (and whatever else is going on), but good news nonetheless. After the death of Korey Stringer at a Vikings training camp back in 2001 this kind of story is perpetually terrifying, so if it ends with a text and an enormous guy spending the afternoon drinking water out of one of those big sippy cups, I’m okay with it.
