Former Ohio State beast and current Jacksonville Jaguars defensive tackle DaVon Hamilton recently opened up about a totally terrifying medical emergency from 2023. What the public and NFL media originally understood to be an undisclosed, routine “non-football back injury” was actually a life-threatening spinal epidural abscess. According to him, he was just a couple of minutes away from paralysis from the waist down.
This rare condition (spinal epidural abscess) is basically a nasty pocket of infected fluid that trapped itself inside his spinal canal and started crushing his nerves.
The whole nightmare started rolling in August 2023 when the Jaguars were doing joint training camp practices with the Detroit Lions. Hamilton started dealing with this brutal, unmanageable back pain that completely stumped the team’s medical staff.
The agony was so intense that he couldn’t even lie flat on a regular bed, so the trainers literally had to put a random pool lounge chair in his hotel room just so he could catch a few hours of sleep.
“I need help to walk, period. I had two or three people helping me,” Hamilton told ESPN. “So, I’m just getting held up by a couple trainers and [the Jaguars’ medical staff] is like, ‘We need to get you to the hospital now.’”
Things went from bad to worse on the flight home after a preseason game. By the time the plane touched down in Jacksonville, the infection had completely cut off his circulation. His legs went totally numb, and trainers had to carry him off the aircraft straight into an ambulance.
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For a professional athlete of his size, 6-foot-4 and weighing about over 320 pounds, being completely unable to lift either leg off a hospital bed scared the heck out of everybody there. Dr. Wallace knew they were racing against a ticking clock and rushed Hamilton into emergency surgery at 6:30 AM on a Sunday morning.
He completely bumped all his other scheduled procedures. Wallace later explained that when your spinal cord is getting compressed like that, minutes literally make the difference between walking out of the hospital or spending the rest of your life in a wheelchair.
If they had been 30 minutes later, or if his surgeon, Dr. Bradley Wallace, hadn’t been in the building that day, paralysis was the only thing that could have been in the cards for him.
To save Hamilton’s NFL career and protect his back from serious long-term damage, Dr. Wallace decided not to use traditional open-back surgery because it would have required cutting through a lot of muscle and bone. Instead of a big surgery, doctors did a small, careful procedure. They made small cuts and drained the infection near his spine. The next day, Hamilton shocked everyone by standing up and walking a little with help.
Even after the successful surgery, the recovery process was still extremely difficult. To make sure the dangerous bacteria were fully gone, Hamilton had to go through an intense eight-week treatment with strong intravenous antibiotics. Doctors placed a PICC line, which is a long, flexible tube, into a vein in his arm and ran it close to his heart so the medicine could move directly through his bloodstream.
The treatment drained all his energy and caused him to lose a lot of weight. For a defensive tackle of his size, things could not have felt much lower than that. The only way forward was through hard work and a lot of reflection.
Looking back now, the 2020 Ohio State NFL draftee believes the experience happened for a reason.
“I had a lot of time to reflect,” Hamilton said. “A lot of time really spent with God … understanding God has a plan for me and that this is no random event, but something that … I can learn from, inspire others with.”
The craziest part is that doctors still do not fully understand how a healthy 26-year-old athlete in top physical condition got this infection in the first place.
DaVon Hamilton’s recovery needs to be studied
According to the National Institutes of Health, common causes of a spinal abscess include drug use with needles, recent back surgery, or severe diabetes, but none of those applied to Hamilton.
The Jaguars’ team doctor, Kevin Kaplan, even shared Hamilton’s case with a national group of orthopedic surgeons because there are no known cases of a completely healthy NFL player suddenly developing this exact condition. Against all odds, Hamilton made an incredible comeback during the 2025 season and shocked many people by returning to the field only eight games later that same year.
He was naturally a little rusty at first, but over the next few offseasons he worked hard to fully regain his form and eventually became one of the biggest reasons the Jaguars built one of the best run defenses in the league.
Now fully healthy and playing through the later years of his major contract extension, Hamilton continues using his story to inspire others, often speaking with fans and patients dealing with difficult health battles of their own!
