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          NFL Nation

          Cardinals' Antonio Hamilton thankful after comeback from second-degree burns

          • Josh Weinfuss, ESPN Staff WriterOct 15, 2022, 10:00 AM
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              Josh Weinfuss is a staff writer who covers the Arizona Cardinals and the NFL at ESPN. Josh has covered the Cardinals since 2012, joining ESPN in 2013. He is a member of the Pro Football Writers of America and a graduate of Indiana University. You can follow him via Twitter @joshweinfuss.
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          TEMPE, Ariz. -- Antonio Hamilton hardly slept last Saturday night.

          The sheer excitement of what was going to happen the next day wouldn’t let him. Adrenaline, gratitude and emotion were about to carry the Arizona Cardinals cornerback through last Sunday's game against the Philadelphia Eagles.

          When Hamilton arrived at State Farm Stadium for his first game of the season, he wanted to stay composed. He was set to play six weeks after a grease fire in his kitchen led to second-degree burns on his feet and had cut short an opportunity to be an opening-day starter.

          Throughout the past month and a half, Hamilton has ridden an emotional roller coaster. It started in the early days after his injury, when Hamilton questioned whether he’d ever play again.

          “I was in a very, very, very dark place,” he said. “The place of uncertainty. I didn't know what was going to happen after I got burned.”

          Doctors were unsure how long his recovery would take -- they initially estimated a minimum of two to three months. He couldn’t get himself out of bed or go to the bathroom without assistance. He couldn’t get on the floor to play with his kids.

          “All of that stuff just kind of hit you all at once,” Hamilton said. “And, then, just like, I don't know if I'm going to be the same.”

          The Cardinals placed him on the reserve/non-football injury, meaning he would miss at least the first four games of the season. But Hamilton was able to return quicker than just about anyone anticipated.

          The 29-year-old wanted to take last Sunday in slowly, soak it all in. He put on his uniform in the Cardinals’ locker room, walked out to the field for pregame warm-ups and said a prayer, asking for peace and the ability to control his emotions.

          He couldn’t.

          “I put my helmet on for one second, stepped in between those lines, and it just all came out and that was the end of it,” Hamilton said. “I couldn't hold it in. ... Just having so much gratitude. A lot of people have situations where they never recover from it, and I recovered from my situation, from being in the gray or in the place of the unknown.”

          HAMILTON ESTIMATED HE'S fried shrimp “hundreds of times,” but he still doesn’t understand what happened the night of Aug. 22.

          He was using a new pot to make dinner the night before the Cardinals were set to head to Nashville for a joint practice and preseason game against the Tennessee Titans. He washed it and then heated the oil, but before he could add the shrimp, the pot caught on fire.

          The next 30 seconds changed Hamilton’s life.

          Hamilton tried to find a fire extinguisher, which he later discovered was still boxed up in the house he was renting. The smoke detectors were going off. His daughters, who are 5 and 2, were crying.

          When he picked up the pot, Hamilton burned his face, which caused him to drop it. Oil splattered on his shorts, igniting them. What he didn’t realize as he made sure the fire didn’t spread to the floor was that his feet had been badly burned.

          Hamilton drove himself to the emergency room and tried to organize his thoughts. He kept wondering what the doctors would think. He could see his leg was burned but he didn’t realize the condition of his feet.

          Hamilton was initially diagnosed with second-degree burns but doctors told him the oil could continue to burn for up to two or three days, so there was a risk the injury could worsen to third-degree burns. If that happened, Hamilton might have needed skin grafts and lost feeling in his feet.

          The final diagnosis was “very deep” second-degree burns with third-degree burns in some places.

          He was discharged and sent home.

          Then life got hard.

          Hamilton said the first week was “OK,” but the second week was “total hell.” He couldn’t eat. His muscles started to atrophy.

          “I lost so much weight,” he said.

          The realization of his new, albeit temporary, reality was settling in. That meant relying on his wife, Tiara -- who was seven-and-a-half months pregnant with their third child -- for, well, nearly everything. She changed his bandages and cared for his feet, while also caring for their daughters.

          “She went through hell because I went in that dark space and it wasn’t fun,” he said.

          He had a regimen of doctor’s appointments: Every three days for about two weeks, then every four or five days, and now once a month.

          When his teammates would reach out to check in, and ask if he needed anything or if they could do anything, Hamilton was polite but in his head said, “I’m not going to let you.”

          Even though he didn’t have a choice but to rely on his wife, Hamilton didn’t want to ask her to do anything for him either.

          But Tiara didn’t take it easy on Hamilton.

          “She was on my ass,” he said. “Like there were times where I didn’t want to clean my feet because it hurt to touch it and she was like, ‘Come on. We got to go through this.’

          “I just want to thank her and just tell her I love her. I'm extremely appreciative because I wouldn't have made it throughout that situation without her.”

          WHEN DOCTORS TOLD Hamilton his recovery could take as long as three months, he was devastated.

          The former walk-on at South Carolina State who had built a seven-year NFL career with four teams after going undrafted in 2016 was set to be a starter for the first time.

          “He was playing some of the best ball I ever seen him play,” Cardinals cornerbacks coach Greg Williams said.

          Hamilton said he got through his recovery with the help of Tiara’s encouragement, an inspirational song -- he played "Million Little Miracles” daily -- and a couple of books. He handed out copies of “More Than a Carpenter” and “The Purpose Driven Life” to people he met at the burn center when he’d go for follow-up appointments.

          But it was his faith that changed Hamilton’s perspective on his burns.

          He started looking at the incident as what was meant to happen instead of just an accident. But that didn’t stop him from questioning God -- “a lot.”

          “I was like, ‘Just why? Just why? Just why?’ Hamilton said. “Well, just give me the signs and allow me to see what it is that you want me to see from this situation.

          “I was supposed to be just a beacon of light just to continue to show people what it is to stand strong in your faith, no matter what the situation looked like. Because in the blink of an eye, everything could be gone like that. It's up to you how you choose to handle it. You can choose to go in that dark hole and stay there, or you can choose to climb up out of it.”

          There was always hope he could come back after missing the minimum first four games. Then his feet began recovering at a rapid pace.

          “It's amazing what the body can do, No. 1, because when the doctor [saw] my feet and week by week by week, it was like, ‘Man, your feet are just healing like so, so fast,’” Hamilton recalled. “And that was encouraging to me. So, I was trying to do everything that I could as far as taking different vitamins and having more of a sense of urgency and sense of being deliberate and what it was that I was putting in my body because I wanted everything to heal properly."

          After a few weeks, coaches noticed a big difference.

          "He's made great progress," coach Kliff Kingsbury said in early September. "When I first saw him, he could barely move around and now he's walking around and feels a lot better."

          Hamilton started working out indoors because his burns couldn’t be exposed to sunlight.

          He returned to the field about two weeks ago, working out for 20 minutes per day, three days a week on the Cardinals’ outside practice fields. His feet were healed enough for him to put sunscreen on them.

          He posted a video of him going through some back-pedaling drills on Sept. 26 and was designated to return to practice on Oct. 3.

          The skin is fully healed but new skin blisters easily. The pigment is also slowly coming back.

          Williams knew Hamilton was ready the moment he watched him work out after coming off the reserve/non-football injury list.

          “After the first drill, I was good. I was like, ‘OK, I see his foot quickness, I see the turnover, he's not tentative to push off of his feet,’” Williams said. “You could see the long speed hasn't gone.”

          THE DAY AFTER Hamilton played football for the first time since August, he walked to a news conference barefooted.

          He periodically had to shift his weight because when he sits in one spot for a long time, his feet start to tingle and itch because his nerves are still extra sensitive on both feet.

          He wanted to feel the ground under them because, as he learned during his recovery, not all foot-burn victims are fortunate enough to keep their feet.

          He also just wants to be able to touch them when he can.

          “Those small things of being able to just wash my feet, just to rub my feet and put lotion on, that's a big win to me,” he said. “I could barely touch my feet without feeling like I needed to tear down the house, and because of the place that I was in, so, man, I'm just, extremely thankful for it all.”

          Especially for what happened Sunday afternoon.

          Hamilton played 31 snaps against the Eagles -- perhaps 31 of the hardest snaps of his career. He went from 20-minute workouts to a full-fledged NFL game. He felt like he played well, and it was hard to tell he’d missed six weeks.

          But inside, he had been struggling.

          “I hit that sideline after getting off a punt, I felt like I was dying,” he said. “I was just trying to pour water over my face, all over my body. [My teammates were like] 'Ham, you all right?'

          Williams made sure to keep an eye on Hamilton throughout the game, in part to make sure he wasn’t going to pass out, but in part to make sure he kept his head in the game, walking by him periodically, offering reminders: “Focus on your execution.”

          "We eased him back in [Sunday]," Kingsbury said after the game. "Hopefully, he can get more snaps this week.”

          Hamilton didn’t let the tears or emotions overwhelm him. He knew how far he had come. The worst-case scenario wasn’t lost on him -- if the fire had spread he could have lost a child or his wife. He knew how close he came to tragedy and a disaster. He knew how close he came to a severe, life-altering injury.

          And, for all that, he was thankful.

          “I made it through, man.”