Bernie Kosar, one of the great quarterbacks in Cleveland Browns history, has Parkinson’s disease and is suffering from liver failure.
The former NFL player, 60, revealed his diagnosis to Cleveland Magazine in a story published Tuesday, July 9.
Though Kosar’s condition has improved since he was placed on the liver transplant list in the spring, one of his doctors, Dr. Michael Roizen, believes there is a 90 percent chance he will need a new liver.
“I wish you could have seen me three months ago,” Kosar said. “Actually, maybe not, because I looked like death. I felt like death. E. coli blood poisoning. Heart trouble. And I really thought I needed the liver transplant ASAP. I was in bad shape.”
Dr. Anthony Post, who is also treating Kosar, stressed that his condition can change rapidly.
“Liver disease does tend to fluctuate,” he said. “So he’s on that wave thing where it goes up and down. He’s in a good phase right now, but anything bad could happen.”
Kosar revealed that health issues have followed him for years, but it wasn’t until a cirrhosis diagnosis last year that he began to understand the severity of what was going on. He recalled watching the Browns play the Jets as the point “my body gave out on me.”
“I really felt like I wasn’t going to make it home from the Jets game,” he said. “I sucked it up, though, and continued to avoid the doctors until the new year. Then I went into the hospital and got a massive blood transfusion. It was like: ‘How are you alive? How are you moving?’ Because your hemoglobin levels are so low.’”
As a former football player, Kosar may be used to playing through pain, but Roizen cautioned that adjusting to life with a new liver, if he does get a transplant, can be difficult.
“He is a wonderful and tough human being,” Roizen said, “but undergoing a transplant, no matter who you are, is a difficult thing: difficult to get the transplant, difficult to live with it.”
But Post believes Kosar has put himself in a good position, considering his circumstances. That has played a role in his improvement.
“Remarkably — you know, he takes a lot of supplements, he’s been exercising and has been on a good diet and is taking the medications that we’ve prescribed him and we’ve been following him pretty closely so — he’s really gotten a lot better,” he said.
For Kosar’s part, he’s staying positive.
“I visualize good health. It’s not so much that I’m trying to sell it to myself, or that I’m in denial, as it is choosing to be positive,” he explained. “Because everybody’s got something. We’ve all got health issues to some degree, we all have bumps in the road.”
