STEELERS Maddox recalls his fearful experience

The quarterback has received thousands of get-well wishes.
PITTSBURGH (AP) -- Tommy Maddox went from a football game to an X-ray table, with a doctor hovering above him and asking the quarterback to squeeze his hand.
Dazed, confused, not knowing why he still wasn't playing the game or what had happened, the Pittsburgh Steelers' quarterback instinctively squeezed back.
"I heard them saying, 'All right, we've got something going' -- and that's when I got scared," Maddox said. "I realized I still wasn't moving my legs, and that was the tough part."
Closer to normal
The easy part for Maddox came Wednesday. Three days after getting the scare of his life, he became a football player again. He rode an exercise bike, hugged his Steelers teammates, tossed a football casually, attended the daily quarterbacks meeting and began plowing through a stack of 1,000 e-mails sent him by relieved and appreciative fans.
He has watched replays of the rather unremarkable hit by Titans linebacker Keith Bulluck that caused him to lose consciousness and his head to twist into the Tennessee turf, his arms and legs instantly going numb.
He remembers none of it -- his face mask being cut off, both teams praying for him, the ride in the ambulance -- until waking up in Nashville's Baptist Hospital and realizing he couldn't move anything.
"That's when it started bothering me a little bit," he said. "It's hard. You think about your kids, your wife. ... I just thank God it's worked out the way it worked out."
At one point on that Sunday night he doesn't fully remember but will never forget, Maddox was told Titans quarterback Steve McNair was there to see him -- and Titans running back Eddie George came into the room instead.
"Then I knew I was really knocked out," Maddox said, smiling.
Maddox, who has made what doctors said was a remarkably quick recovery from his cerebral and spinal cord concussions, said there never was any question he would play again after doctors told him everything was fine.
"If something had come back in the MRI that might have said, 'You're running a risk to get hit again,' that obviously is something we would have had to take a look at," Maddox said. "But everything came back clean, so that made the decision very easy."
He knows it will take time to get back, to regain the leg strength he lost during his two days in hospitals and to flush out the vast quantities of drugs he was given.