The most terrifying moment of Ryan Miller’s life was setting in and there was nothing he could do about it. It was the summer of 2015 and he had just returned to his apartment in Texas after a practice with the Dallas Cowboys. He phoned his wife and told her he had a good workout but something felt off.
His head wasn’t right. His body wasn’t right. Something wasn’t right.
“I hung up with her and the real onset of it came,” he said. He started vomiting. He lost his balance and couldn’t stand. His legs wobbled and his body stopped working.
“I couldn’t even open my phone to dial 911,” he said. “… I had felt like you filled (my head) with hot sulfur and somebody had taken an anvil and was slamming my head against that anvil. All I wanted to do was die. Then I woke up two days later on the bathroom floor, no idea really what happened.”
For years, the cameras followed Miller, from his days as a standout at Columbine High, to his time anchoring the offensive line at the University of Colorado. They followed him to the NFL, where, for four years, he bounced from Cleveland to Denver to San Diego and, finally, Dallas.
But they stopped there.
No one got to see the ensuing 18 months of darkness and terror, save for his wife, Ania, and his beloved yellow lab, Nash. No one got the full story on Ryan Miller and he didn’t want it any other way.
Until now.
“I kept this very quiet for a long time, because as a football player, you’re trained to sweep things under the rug,” he said. “If you’re hurt, you ice something. You don’t speak up about stuff. You want to fight and fight and fight and fight until basically you can’t any longer. But when it comes to mental health and concussions, sometimes nobody will know but you, and it takes a tremendous amount of courage to stand up and say something about it.”
Miller, 27, is finally speaking out about his tears, his migraines, his memory loss, his seizures, his depression, his anger, his compassion and, now, his hope. Almost two years after he was diagnosed with post-concussion syndrome (PCS), he’s finally finding his way back to normalcy, or as close as he can get to it.
Earlier this year, he pledged to donate his brain to research of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) through the Concussion Legacy Foundation. His symptoms from PCS mirror those of other current and former players, many of whom live in fear of developing CTE as a result of their football careers.
Miller doesn’t know if he has CTE. There’s no way he can know yet.
But he knows he has to talk about it — finally.
“I was in complete disarray”
Miller has seen the tape and heard the stories from teammates and coaches who hovered over him with worry that summer day in 2013.
But all he remembers is fear and panic.
For minutes, Miller lay motionless inside the Cleveland Browns’ field house after taking a blow to the head during a blocking drill at training camp. The music blaring through the loudspeakers cut off and gave way to shock and sirens as an ambulance rushed over. As his teammates silently prayed, Miller was strapped to a backboard and taken to a hospital where he was diagnosed with a concussion.
“I remember waking up in a hospital bed with a splitting headache,” he recalled. “Everything bothered me — sound, light, movement. It’s sheer terror. All the lights were off. I freaked out. I woke up and I thought I was fighting for my life. … I was in complete disarray. I actually lunged forward and broke out of my straps, scared the nurse in the corner to death.
“That was the start of it.”
It was also the end of it. Miller, then in his second NFL season, never played another game, for reasons that extended beyond that one concussion. But throughout his journey, he sustained many others.
There was that one in San Diego in December 2014, when Miller slipped on concrete while running out to practice and missed the remainder of the season.
“That one didn’t concern me initially as much,” Ania said. “I think it frustrated me more because it wasn’t on the field. It was the one day in San Diego that it rains and he was in cleats and slipped and fell and smacked his head.”
But that one in Dallas nearly two years ago was the final straw.
“That’s kind of what led me to a little more digging into what was going on,” he said.
Miller said he’s had 10 concussions documented in his medical record. But there could have been many more that went undocumented and countless others that he didn’t even know were concussions. He believes they all compounded, as his susceptibility increased and his body’s tolerance of the symptoms plummeted.
It wasn’t until that summer of 2015 with the Cowboys that reality set in. He was diagnosed with PCS by two doctors. Dallas released him with an injury settlement and Miller’s life as an NFL player spiraled into one of isolation, as he lay in the dark at his home in Parker and often blacked out for hours at a time.
“I would go to the grocery store to buy groceries and I’d come home and then I would go to the grocery store a half-hour later and buy the exact same things,” he said. “Really frustrating stuff and feeling alone in this.”
Sometimes, snapshots of his life would appear in his head.
“They’re there, then they’re not and you don’t know what’s going on,” he said.
Sometimes, he would have the same conversation with people, again and again.
Sometimes his wife would find him on the floor seizing.
“I’ve witnessed two of them,” she said. “I’m not exactly sure how many he’s had.”
The 6-foot-7, 320-pounder who made a career of bulldozing defenders had become a prisoner in his own body. The PCS, like a light switch, still flips on and off, with no warning and no control. Some days are good head days. Other days are terrible.
He’s not alone and never was — especially not among former football players. But it wasn’t until last year that he realized as much.
Help and hope
Hope was restored when Miller sat on a couch in Sedalia and listened. The tears flowed, along with his fears.
Through his agent, Miller was connected to former Avalanche enforcer Scott Parker and his wife, Francesca. The former is dealing with everything Miller has over the last year and half following a career of fighting and throwing his body around like a crash dummy. The Parkers’ organization, Parkers Platoon, was developed to help veterans, athletes and others cope with the symptoms of PCS and traumatic brain injury.
For Miller, the acceptance and understanding was enough to spark a turnaround.
“I sat in a room and I bawled my eyes out and I gave my entire life story to these people that I never met before,” he said. “If you’ve never met (Francesca), she’s an angel. Golly, that halo is brighter than any I’ve ever seen. Both her and ‘Park,’ these guys just completely opened up their lives to me and gave me hope.”
Then, with Spencer Milo, a Parkers Platoon member and Purple Heart veteran, Miller launched last fall Iron Spoke BBQ, a backyard hobby turned catering business. That ray of hope inspired purpose and needed structure.
“Cooking for us was therapeutic,” Miller said. “To me it was the best medicine I could take at the time.”
A new passion
Miller isn’t completely free and may never be. The hulk of a man who could make easy work of a weight room has to remind himself that those good head days aren’t free gym passes. Overexertion can and has and will lead to days in bed with migraines and uncontrollable nausea.
But his trajectory now points upward after months of pointing straight down. With clarity, his purpose has expanded. The lifelong lineman has morphed into an advocate — one who still loves and cherishes football, but feels a need to air the warnings.
And he doesn’t mince his words.
“I’m a little bitter about how my head stuff was treated and in no way shape or form should anyone have to deal with what I went through,” Miller said of his time in the NFL. “Frankly, it’s downright despicable. So anything I can do to help guys who have been in my situation, not just when I’m dead, but now.”
So when Chris Nowinski, the founder of the Concussion Legacy Foundation, reached out, Miller listened again.
Nowinski, like those with Parkers Platoon, understands the plight of the professional athlete in dealing with head injuries. A former football player and professional wrestler, Nowinski, too, is dealing with lingering effects of PCS.
“The cost of being diagnosed with a concussion is so high now that the incentive to both not report concussions and also not be associated with the cause is high,” Nowinski said. “I would even argue that NFL owners are so anti-CTE that players don’t want to be perceived as even thinking about CTE while they’re active. It’s twisted.”
Nowinski developed the Concussion Legacy Foundation in 2007 and, in partnership with Boston University, has helped lead the charge in raising awareness and trying to provide answers about CTE and traumatic brain injuries. In February, as part of the foundation’s annual Brain Pledge Month, 30 former NFL players pledged to donate their brains for research after they die.
Miller was one. He’s now one of more 200 who pledged in February and more than 1,700 over the years.
“If his brain can aid in helping research for others who are dealing with these things, then by all means,” Ania said. “I told him if he was comfortable with it, then he should go for it.”
The goal? Hope. To find it and to provide it.
“I wish I wouldn’t have taken a beating,” Miller said, looking back on his football career. “But I did and that has put me now in this place where I can come out and say something about it. People need to know. Mental health is a very real thing and people deal with it — children, adults, pro athletes and various others. To anyone else feeling alone in this, know that you’re not the first, nor the last. And most importantly, there is hope for us.”
