Myron Rolle has gone from the secondary at Florida State to the front lines at Massachusetts General Hospital.
The former Rhodes Scholar and Tennessee Titans safety is now a doctor and third-year neurosurgery resident in Boston helping in the fight against the coronavirus.
“I went down to the emergency department, and as I was walking through the emergency department I was seeing so many individuals with respiratory distress and respiratory compromise, and the numbers are staggering,” Rolle told ESPN. “Our neurosurgical floor has been transformed into a floor just full of COVID-19 patients.
“It is hectic, that’s for sure.”
Rolle said the neurosurgery department’s operating rooms may be turned into ICUs because of the overflowing number of coronavirus patients. Their supplies are “pretty limited right now and dwindling,” the 33-year-old said.
Rolle graduated from Florida State early, after playing three seasons, and then spent what would have been his senior year at Oxford University. He was later drafted by the Titans in the sixth round of the 2010 draft, but did not play in any regular-season games before retiring in 2013 to go to medical school.
“Football has never left me,” Rolle said. “I still wake up in the morning and think of the operating room like a game, like it’s showtime, let’s perform. I gotta do what I gotta do because people are counting on us right now. This is our time to help very sick people. So that motivation continues to drive me every single day.”