J.J. Watt has endured a number of injuries in his career but the scariest one was never acknowledged by the Houston Texans as an actual injury.

“One Friday night last season, I noticed some weird bumps on my knee,” Watt writes on The Players Tribune. “I thought it was a rash, so I went and asked our trainer if he had any cream. He looked at my knee and said, ‘That looks really bad. We have to get you to the hospital right now.”

Watt initially thought the trainer was joking.

“I could see in his face that he was serious and actually a bit panicked,” Watt explains. “As it turned out, he saved me in a big way. At the hospital, they immediately put me on three hours of the strongest antibiotic IVs. I went straight from the hospital to the team plane and we flew to Jacksonville. Once we landed, there were two more hours of antibiotics that night and two more the next morning before the game. The medicine had completely drained me, but I played — and we won.”

A team doctor told Watt he could have lost his leg if the trainer hadn't recognized the problem.

the postgame comments made it sound like a traditional illness, not a limb-threatening bacterial infection.

“Couple days ago. Yesterday? I don’t even know,” Watt said upon being asked when he got sick. “It’s OK. We got a good staff and they took good care of me.”