Taylor Decker was sitting in the shower shivering, grasping for answers in the middle of the night. It was two days before the Lions' 2020 season opener against the Bears and Decker, fresh off signing a $60 million extension, had no clue why his insides were on fire.
"I woke up in the middle of the night sweating, shivering, my stomach hurt so bad," Decker said this week on the Pardon My Take Podcast (condensed clip below). "I was like, I don’t know what’s going on. Am I constipated? Did I have too much Jet’s Pizza? I felt terrible, I was sweating, going crazy, shivering, sitting in the shower.
"And then I was like, I can’t tell anybody about this, I just signed a contract extension. Like, I have to play."
So that's what he did on Sunday, playing every offensive snap for the Lions in a 27-23 loss. It wasn't until Wednesday that he told the team, "Hey, I don't feel good. Something’s going on with my stomach or my side or something like that.’"
After sending him for tests, doctors told Decker, "Oh yeah, you have appendicitis. You’ve had it for a week. You should have told us this sooner.’"
Appendicitis, which causes extreme abdominal pain, occurs when the appendix becomes inflamed and filled with pus. Treatment almost always requires surgical removal of the appendix as quickly as possible. Instead, Decker resolved to keep playing through it.
"I was like, I can’t not play, I just signed a contract extension. I can’t be the guy that signs a contract and not play," he said. "So they put me on antibiotics and I basically had appendicitis for the first month of the season and then the antibiotics made it go away."
Doctors told Decker that if it ever returns, he'll have to have the appendix removed. But two years later, he's still going strong.
"Just built different," he said. "It is what it is."