Battered warrior making a stand
Former Seahawks player fighting NFL teams over ‘abusive levels’ of painkillers that kept him on the field while injured
Jerry Wunsch used to plow into the biggest, strongest players the NFL had to offer.
Now, the former Seahawks offensive tackle struggles to walk a few blocks, climb the stairs at his Florida home, or tie his size 17 shoes. The 43-year-old divorced father of three suffers debilitating headaches, forgets what he did a week ago, can’t keep a steady job and worries his two teenage sons and younger daughter will someday need to put him in institutional care.
His knees and lower back strain as a wincing Wunsch, 6-foot-6 and pushing 400 pounds, rises from a chair at his lawyer’s office in Edmonds. Wunsch attributes his ongoing pain and deteriorating mental state to the blows he absorbed while numbed by painkillers he says the Seahawks freely gave players to keep them on the field.
“It’s frightening as hell,” Wunsch said. “I drive home and I forget my way home. My girlfriend — and thank God for her — she helps me put my pants on. And I hate to say it, even underwear. That’s where it’s at.”
Wunsch was never a star during his 113-game career, starting less than half the time. He played for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers from 1997-2001 and the Seahawks from 2002-05. Then, during training camp in August of ’05, before the season that saw the Seahawks make it to their first Super Bowl, his career was cut short by complications from a shredded ankle tendon.
In retirement, Wunsch has emerged as a forceful NFL critic, waging two legal battles that cast a harsh light on the scope of prescription drug use in the injury-prone league.
In Washington state, Wunsch has fought for more than two years to win workers’ compensation for his physical and mental ailments. The Seahawks have opposed him at every step — even hiring private investigators to conduct surveillance of him — and the state’s Department of Labor & Industries initially denied Wunsch’s claims.
Last month, a state industrial appeals judge overturned that decision and ruled Wunsch eligible for compensation for “neuro-cognitive disorder-dementia due to head injury” and for residual pain from injuries to his knees, back, neck, elbows and ankles.
But the legal struggle might not be over: The Seahawks have until April 19 to appeal the judge’s decision.
Meanwhile, Wunsch is one of 13 plaintiffs named in a federal lawsuit accusing all 32 NFL teams of administering abusive levels of painkillers to keep players on the field — putting profits over safety. The lawsuit, in U.S. District Court in Northern California, alleges that by masking players’ pain signals, the drug use aggravated injuries and led to organ damage and other complications including addiction to opioid painkillers.
The plaintiffs’ lawyers have nearly 2,000 retired players as clients, and are asking a judge to certify the lawsuit as a class action on behalf of former players.
Players often have been eager to take such medications — some insist on it — to help them continue earning pay cheques during often brief careers. But the ethics and repercussions of the league’s drug use are being scrutinized like never before.
Depositions of NFL physicians and trainers are underway in the two-year-old federal case, and court filings — including one recently unsealed — detail widespread use of powerful prescription drugs such as Vicodin and Toradol. An amended complaint filed earlier this year alleges that actions team doctors have admitted to taking are violations of the federal Substance Control Act.
The NFL and its teams dispute the claims, saying medical personnel provide quality medical care and control players’ drug use. A response to the amended complaint says the suit should be dismissed, in part because most claims exceed the statute of limitations.
A MIX OF POTENT NSAIDS
While the broader legal battle plays out, Wunsch’s little-known compensation case in Washington offers a detailed and unsettling study of one player’s battle with pain — and the drugs that kept him on the field.
Wunsch shared his medical files with The Seattle Times so they could be compared with records the Seahawks were compelled to produce in the compensation hearings. Along with those records, depositions of two athletic trainers who worked for the Seahawks when Wunsch played, Sam Ramsden and Ken Smith, as well as team physician Stanley Herring, indicate prescription drugs weren’t always controlled and distributed by doctors, nor accurately accounted for in records.
The records show Wunsch received injections of Toradol — a powerful non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drug (NSAID) — before 28 of his 34 regular season and playoff games with the Seahawks. They also indicate he was given prescription painkillers Vicodin, Indocin, Hyalgan, Bextra and Vioxx, while he was taking the sleep aid Ambien along with weekly fistfuls of Tylenol and Advil.
In some cases, Wunsch took additional NSAIDs — most notably, Indocin — in the hours before and after his Toradol injections. A “black box” warning from the FDA, the strongest it issues, cautions against using Toradol while taking other NSAIDs. It says Toradol misuse can cause serious complications, including cardiovascular and kidney damage and a rupture or ulceration of the stomach lining.
It isn’t only mixing Toradol and other NSAIDs that carries risk. High doses of any NSAID — including over-the-counter Advil, Motrin or Aleve — over prolonged periods can do damage.
“Anti-inflammatory medications, they’re not benign,” Dr. Jonathan Finnoff, medical director of the Mayo Clinic’s sports-medicine centre in Minnesota, and team physician for the NBA’s Minnesota Timberwolves, said in an interview. “The more you are exposed to anti-inflammatories, the more it potentially erases the protective lining of your stomach so that the acid in your stomach will start to eat through it.”
Wunsch’s medical records indicate his maladies include hypertension and Crohn’s disease, which was diagnosed in 2009 and can cause stomach and intestinal ulcerations.
But in Washington state, an industrial appeals judge rejected a claim that his gastrointestinal condition had been caused or aggravated by his NFL painkiller use. Wunsch’s lawyer, Bill Hochberg, said he plans to challenge that ruling.
Seahawks doctors, in written documentation of the injections, noted they explained the risks of GI bleeding and other Toradol complications to Wunsch, and often noted that he accepted those risks.
But Wunsch maintains he wasn’t warned verbally by the quartet of then-Seahawks doctors — Herring, Bradford Shoup, Ed Khalfayan and Kevin Auld. He described lining up with Seahawks teammates outside a trainer’s office for pre-game Toradol injections in which he’d be told to sign a slip of paper before getting a needle to the buttocks.
“It would take 30 minutes to an hour and the pain went away for the most part,” Wunsch said, adding the injections were as much to block out anticipated in-game pain as to lessen existing aches. “You’d get hit and hurt something else and you wouldn’t even know it.”
That dulling of pain is what Wunsch says enabled him to batter his body far beyond what it would ordinarily tolerate. He says he suffered three serious undiagnosed concussions in which he was “knocked out” temporarily, and perhaps 20 minor ones during his career. But he kept playing — even when he’d vomit in the huddle or locker-room tunnel.
‘OUT OF MY MIND’
Documents from Wunsch’s compensation case paint a detailed picture of the drugs he received.
The records show that, during a six-week period in August and September 2003, Wunsch received six pre-game Toradol injections while also being prescribed the NSAID Indocin on at least three occasions.
Later that season, in November, Wunsch “tore up his side” while playing Washington. Records show Wunsch was put on a daily regimen of Indocin then for his pain.
On Nov. 15, 2003, still badly bruised, he got a Toradol shot from Shoup before playing against Detroit.
Wunsch testified in the compensation case that the team feared he still had internal bleeding a week later, when the Seahawks were in Baltimore to play the Ravens.
The day before that game, records show, Wunsch complained to Shoup of gastroenteritis and abdominal pain. Gastrointestinal problems are a potential complication of longterm NSAID use — or combining Toradol and other NSAIDs.
After his stomach complaints, the team decided against Wunsch taking Toradol before playing the Ravens. Instead, he took an Ambien pill to sleep the night before, then woke up at 4 a.m., took his regular Indocin and headed to the stadium. When he arrived, Shoup gave him a codeine-laced Tylenol 3 pill and Wunsch underwent acupuncture sessions to loosen up.
But Wunsch, in an interview, said he still felt too sore and told then-Seahawks head coach Mike Holmgren he couldn’t play. Holmgren, he added, had once told him he’d always have a job if healthy, and Wunsch took that to mean he needed to do whatever it took to stay on the field.
In Baltimore that morning, Wunsch said Holmgren summoned trainer Ramsden and another team doctor, who gave him a 750-milligram “extra strength” Vicodin pill and sent him into the game.
By halftime, Wunsch again complained of being too sore to continue. At that point, he said, Ramsden, standing on the sidelines, reached in his pocket and handed him another Vicodin to finish the game.
“I knew it was not in my best interest to have 1,500 milligrams of Vicodin in me playing in an NFL game,” Wunsch told the Times. “I was out of my mind. People had to point to where to go.”
Wunsch said he was still “high as a kite” when the team flew back to Seattle post-game. He woke up the next day unable to remember driving home from the airport.
Wunsch’s Toradol injections continued into January 2005, when he was given a shot so he could withstand a playoff game against the Rams. That game, which the Seahawks lost, turned out to be Wunsch’s last.
‘PAIN IS A GOOD THING’
Some teams and doctors cited in the Harvard Law School study say Toradol use has declined since 2012. That’s when a task force of NFL physicians recommended using the drug’s pill form rather than injections and only for existing injuries — not to block out anticipated in-game pain.
But filings in the federal lawsuit show an October 2014 NFL survey — with responses from 27 of 32 teams — indicated an average of 26.7 players out of 53 on a team were still taking Toradol on game days.
Pittsburgh Steelers physician Anthony Yates testified that players were still lining up for “the T-Train” — pre-game Toradol injections — last season.
Wunsch welcomes anything that helps current players avoid his fate.
He has qualified for part of an NFL class action settlement of a 2015 lawsuit alleging that the league concealed the risks of concussions. And, he has received disability ratings qualifying him for compensation from the Social Security Administration and the NFL’s retirement plan.
While Wunsch played in his final year at Tampa under a multimillion-dollar contract, he got cut and collected just a fraction of the full amount. He signed on for less money with Seattle. His years of NFL paydays are now long passed, and these days money is tight.
On bad days, when his pain clamps down like a vice, he stays confined to his 1,000-foot house near Tampa, Fla. Other times, he’s frightened by the memory lapses that get him lost driving his 11-year-old pickup truck just blocks from home.
He still loves football. He has two sons playing the game in high school. But he’s adamant that NFL doctors must be hired independent of teams — and that the league must make it a priority to safeguard the long-term health of players.
“Football needs to continue. It has to continue,” Wunsch said. “But I want to know I’ve done everything I can to protect everybody that’s coming behind me.”