Rob Gronkowski announced Tuesday morning he's partnering with CBDMedic, a company that produces cannabidiol-based products for pain relief.
The reason? He was in a lot of pain during his New England Patriots career -- especially after his final game with the team before retiring in March.
Gronkowski painted a vivid picture of this pain during his press conference, going into detail about a painful quad injury he suffered during the second quarter of Super Bowl LIII after taking a nasty hit to the leg.
Gronk stayed in the game to help the Patriots beat the Rams 13-3, but suffered the consequences of his injury for weeks.
"I got done with the game, I could barely walk," Gronkowski told the audience. "I go to the after party, I sit down and I’m just chilling all day, like the rest of the night until 3 a.m. I try to go to bed, I slept for five minutes that night. I couldn’t even think.
"I was in tears, in my bed, after a Super Bowl victory. It didn't make that much sense to me. And then, for four weeks, I couldn't even sleep for more than 20 minutes a night after a Super Bowl win. And I was like, 'Damn, this sucks.' "
Our Tom E. Curran said Gronk related the same story to him after the game.
According to Gronkowski, that four-week period was a living hell in which he had a significant amount of blood removed from his swollen leg.
"I had internal bleeding," Gronkowski said. "I took out 200 milliliters of blood four weeks later, and then another week later ... I took out 500 milliliters of blood, and then I took out 300 more milliliters of blood from my quad.
New England Patriots
"So, that's a total of 1,000 milliliters (one liter) I took out of my quad over a four-week period after the Super Bowl. It’s not normal."
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Gronk managed to find some humor amid his world of pain -- "It was record-breaking at the hospital. I was like, ‘You know how I like to break records.' " -- but that painful injury apparently was the final straw that convinced him to walk away at age 29.
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