By: Sarah Madden, Senior Writer

When Wofford linebacker John Patterson walked off the field after a hard hit during the homecoming game against The Citadel on Oct. 22, he held his arm, thinking he ”just had a stinger.” Originally, trainers focused on evaluating his shoulder, Patterson says. It wasn’t until he was standing on the sideline and trainers asked him to look up at the sky that he felt pain in his neck and back.

Patterson fractured the C6 vertebra in his spine after head to head contact with another player. The bone was a millimeter away from causing paralysis, doctors later told him.

“It was a miracle, and as a Christian I give glory to God for everything,” he says. “It’s a miracle that I’m able to walk, and going to classes again a week and a half later.”

Patterson was first evaluated in the Wofford athletic training room, but the x-rays were inconclusive. “The way the medical staff treated me was all in protocol, and the precautions they took played a big role in the fact that nothing moved [further] and I was okay,” he says. “The doctors and trainers did a really good job.”

Though he’d ridden a cart up to the locker room while sitting up, Patterson was taken by ambulance to Spartanburg Regional. He had surgery to fuse several vertebrae on Sunday and was released Wednesday, Oct. 26.

A junior studying English and finance, Patterson will miss the remainder of the season and will spend the next three months in a neck brace.

“I’m focusing on recovering first,” he says. “I feel better, but it’s still painful, and mobility is low right now. I’m just trying to be as positive as I can about everything and get back to normal, I guess, whatever normal is.”

Brent Williamson, associate athletics director for media relations, says that comparably, this season’s total injuries are few. “Every year is different,” he says. “Last year, we had nearly 20 players miss significant time due to injuries. This year, the total is small, but several have been significant.”

Patterson’s injury is the second of what has been a season marked by medical miracles on the football field: junior Michael Roach collapsed on the sidelines during the season-opening game at Tennessee Tech, went into cardiac arrest and stopped breathing for about 45 seconds. He was revived on the field and later diagnosed with hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, a heart condition that causes the walls of ventricles in the heart to thicken and restrict blood flow.  He had about a five percent chance of surviving the cardiac event.

Patterson says that he and Roach want to start a foundation in order to help other athletes who have gone through catastrophic injuries or miracles like they have:

“We want to provide an outlet for people to share their stories… maybe help with some financial aid. We’ll see,” he says. “I’m just trying to find… the story that’s meant to be told, God’s reason for bringing me through this and how I can use this to impact others. That’s partly the reason for the foundation. It’s not limited to, but comes from the background story of two people who God has worked through.”

Roach, however, isn’t the only football player that knows what Patterson is going through:

“One of my best friends from high school, Kyle Williams, plays for Mercer, and all our high school teammates and coaches had been planning on coming to the game to watch us play against each other. He broke his neck—the exact same bone—the week before I did. He told me two days before the Citadel game,” he says. “It makes the story a little bit weirder, I guess.”

For Patterson, it’s a story worth telling.