Chicago Bears great Dick Butkus knows about the pain current Bears' middle linebacker Brian Urlacher is going through. Butkus dealt with chronic knee injuries while playing for Chicago and those injuries forced the NFL Hall of Famer to retire after just nine seasons.
Speaking with Fred Mitchell of the Chicago Tribune, Butkus talked about his experiences dealing with his knee problems, telling Mitchell that he would fly anywhere and try anything to find a cure, just like how Urlacher traveled to Germany for an unconventional procedure,
"I would have done everything. That's why I was trying everything. I was trying acupuncture; I was flying all over the place, trying to find that magic cure. I just couldn't do it."
Doctors told Butkus that he would have to have a risky surgery called a tibial-osteotomy that while could have helped Butkus, it would have only been a temporary cure and could have prevented Butkus from living a functional life after football.
When asked what was the worst thing about his mobility taken away from him, Butkus said the mental anguish with worrying about his knee was more of a problem than the physical pain when it came to his knee problem,
"… It's not so much the pain, it's that you just feel like (the knee is) going to buckle at any time. You have to watch the way you walk. Maybe you can't run and cut as fast as you used to."
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