The New Orleans Saints dealt with a scary situation last week when veteran tight end Jimmy Graham was briefly hospitalized in Los Angeles after experiencing a medical emergency, which team doctors believed to be a seizure. He’s since returned to New Orleans and undergone a battery of tests and evaluations to determine what happened to him and whether it could be a problem again.
It’s early, but Saints head coach Dennis Allen said Tuesday that Graham is trending in the right direction. He stood by the team’s initial statement but added some positive details on the plan for Graham in the final week of preseason.
“I expect to see Jimmy out here, hopefully tomorrow (at Wednesday’s practice),” Allen shared. “We’ll see. But I don’t think it’s going to be anything that’s going to cause him to miss any significant amount of time. I expect him to be out here practicing with us quickly.”
That is a best-case scenario, but even the worst case scenario doesn’t seem too far away either. Allen doesn’t think Graham’s medical issue will lead to him to missing a large amount of time.
Fans were, of course, excited about Graham’s return to the team he started his career with, so this comes as good news. His return to practice, however, would signify something even more important. Graham is physically improving and hopefully this episode won’t have any long-term impact. Seizures can happen once, but they also have the ability to be recurring.
Allen’s latest update is a sign that Graham’s medical testing yielded positive results. Graham wouldn’t be alone in the tight end room to defeat a medical emergency this offseason. If Graham is cleared to play, that should mean he shouldn’t be impacted by this issue in his personal life on a regular basis. That is the true win.
