Trent Taylor hopes to be ready for 49ers camp after five foot surgeries

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SANTA CLARA -- After a very productive training camp, Trent Taylor was slated to have a breakout season in 2019 but unfortunately things did not go as planned for the 49ers wide receiver. 

Five foot surgeries later, Taylor doesn’t have a timeframe for when he will be on the field again but his hope is to be ready for training camp. On Tuesday, he explained what he has been going through since his initial surgery back in August of 2019. 

The plan was to put hardware into Taylor’s fractured bone as a preventive measure, making his recovery a four-to-six week process. Waiting until the bone is broken becomes an eight-to-ten week recovery. 

Things got more complicated when Taylor’s body and the installed screw didn’t cooperate. He had another surgery to insert different hardware and that’s when the foot got infected. The third surgery was to clean out the infection as well as installing a PICC line in order to have a constant stream of antibiotics entering his system. 

That still wasn’t enough to combat the infection in Taylor’s foot, so doctors finally inserted an antibiotic device into the bone itself which remained installed for six weeks. The fifth and final surgery was to remove the antibiotic device. 

Taylor is currently still wearing a walking boot but hopes to be without it soon.

“I think one thing I definitely learned was that all you can do is control what you can control,” Taylor said as the 49ers cleaned out their lockers last Wednesday. “I could just sit around and pout about the bad situation that I’m in and how everything is unfair how this happened to me and whatnot. But that would be just digging myself into a deeper hole. 

“So, no time to pout about it, you just got to keep moving forward, and just go with what I got right now and that’s starting back at ground zero, back to walking and then eventually running and getting back to it.” 

The 49ers' Cinderella journey to Super Bowl LIV made watching from the sidelines a little more tolerable for Taylor but there’s nothing that could make missing an entire season pleasant. 

“Definitely a blast to watch, just to see how successful we were just compared to the last couple years that I’ve been here,” Taylor said. “So that was a good feeling. It was kind of a bittersweet feeling just to see it happen and me not to be able to be a part of it.”  

[RELATED: Fred Warner focused on improvements in 2020]

Taylor not only struggled through foot surgery in 2019 but had a challenging sophomore campaign after going through back surgery during the 2018 offseason. Over his two seasons, he has tallied 69 catches for 645 yards and three touchdowns. 

Taylor has shown a great deal of potential on the field, instantly becoming a reliable target for Jimmy Garoppolo when the quarterback was traded to the 49ers midway through the 2017 season. 

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