ENGLEWOOD, Colo. — Frustrated, but not defeated.
That was the attitude for Shane Ray as he walked off the field on Monday with a soft cast supporting his left wrist and not a drip of sweat on his brow. It’s a sight seen far too often for Ray, who will be heading in this week for his fourth surgery on that wrist in the last year.
“I mean, it’s not like I’m going to go around moping about it,” Ray told BSN Denver as he headed into the locker room.
“I mean, it’s super frustrating,” he told a scrum of media earlier. “You go all offseason, and you think you’re good, you think you’re 100 percent healthy, and then you just get a checkup, and you find out that it’s still got some injured stuff in there and you have to get it fixed.”
Since suffering the injury at the very beginning of training camp last year, Ray has dealt with pain in the wrist. As he went through the offseason still in pain, he told himself, “It’s probably just because of recovery and part of the process,” but when he got back into Broncos headquarters and began to go through practices still in pain, he asked to have it looked at.
What they found was that more work needed to be done. There is still a fracture in the bone that needs to be tended to.
(READ: Shane Ray’s injury was far more gruesome than originally thought)
“Thankfully we caught it now instead of training camp,” Ray said. “I’ve been hearing different things, but two, two and a half, three months is the possible timetable. I think with this—since it’s bone and not like the surgery where they have to repair ligaments and do that—it’s just a bone repair, so I’ll be able to heal a lot faster and try to be ready for day one.”
On the positive side for Ray, it means he shouldn’t have to continue dealing with pain this time.
“The doctors feel that this will be the final one out of four surgeries on my wrist,” he explained. “This is supposed to be a bone fusion in the wrist. It’s supposed to take care of the bone that was damaged that didn’t heal. The optimism about it is that I won’t have any wrist problems and that I’ll be a lot more stable then coming out here now.”
On the negative side, it’ll now be a whole year lost due to an awkward collision in training camp, with nothing to show for it but a few weeks of tape far below the standard he holds himself to. “Annoying,” as he described it to BSN Denver.
“It’s like, ‘Dang, another step in my recovery when I thought I was good after surgery last year,'” He said. “It’s a process, man. I haven’t been getting down about it; I just need to get it fixed so I can play and be 100 percent. That’s the most important thing, my health.”
“Obviously, after this little surgery, just a little cleanup, I’ll do my rehab, I’ll be back, and I’ll be ready to go,” he concluded.
While it’s natural to aim for a Week 1 return, it’s important to note that Ray, understandably, does not want to come back this time like he did last year—hampered. As a 25-year-old player in what has now become a contract year, after the Broncos declined his fifth-year option, he can’t afford to come back at anything but 100 percent. Luckily for the Broncos, they are far more equipped to deal with his injury in 2018 than they were in 2017.
(READ: BSN Exclusive: Shane Ray opens up on Broncos’ decision to decline his fifth-year option)
