A few days before each of the Browns’ first seven games last season, JC Tretter visited team doctors to get his right knee milked.
The 30-year-old veteran center would hobble into the training room and holler, “It's time to milk my knee! Let’s go!” Really, it wasn’t lactation so much as joint aspiration: a procedure where, in the case of Tretter’s knee, enough excess fluid was drained to fill upward of two 60-milliliter syringes—or roughly the volume of a double espresso shot, sans dairy. Regardless, it did the trick of relieving the recurrent swelling so he could lightly participate in practice and then play at full speed in the game.
Then a ninth-year NFL veteran, Tretter was no stranger to overcoming bumps, bruises and worse on that specific part of his 6'4", 307-pound frame. In August 2020, for instance, after undergoing arthroscopic surgery to repair a torn right meniscus that he had unknowingly played through for most of the previous season, he fast-tracked his rehab to rejoin the Browns for their opener less than a month later by icing his knee so feverishly that it developed early signs of frostbite.
