Former NFL player Myron Rolle now works in neurosurgery
BOSTON (BVM) – Myron Rolle played safety and was ranked as the No. 1 high school football player in the country in 2006 by ESPN (above Matthew Stafford and Tim Tebow). A 2010 NFL Draft pick, he’s now known as Dr. Rolle – a sixth-year neurosurgery resident at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital.
The 36-year-old told his story in the latest episode of “Life After” – a show that details the great achievements of former NFL players.
Dr. Rolle took a unique path to the NFL. He was an All-American football player at Florida State University, and while focused on football and his pre-med requirements, he was selected as a Rhodes Scholar as a junior in 2009. He had two life-altering decisions before him: take the graduate scholarship to study at Oxford (an opportunity typically given to future world leaders) or continue to put his 100% into becoming an NFL player.
“There was a very difficult decision of postponing going to the NFL or taking the Rhodes Scholarship,” Dr. Rolle said in his exclusive interview in “Life After.”
Ultimately, Dr. Rolle chose to finish his three-year career with the Seminoles and travel to Oxford in 2009. He finished his college career with 206 total tackles but promised himself that he would return to play football after a year.
Upon returning to the U.S., Dr. Rolle was picked by the Tennessee Titans in the sixth round of the 2010 NFL Draft. But, he chose to retire in 2013 with no stats to show after two seasons in Nashville and one with the Pittsburgh Steelers.
“I stopped playing after three years and it was hard to step away from the game,” Dr. Rolle said in his exclusive interview in “Life After.” “My Tennessee Titans coaches told me, ‘Myron, you can play eight or nine years,’ but unfortunately, it didn’t work out that way.”
As a mid-20-year-old, the disappointment didn’t linger for long as he knew it wasn’t too late to change career paths. He applied for the College of Medicine at FSU (the same year he left the NFL) and earned his doctorate degree in medicine by 2017. He chose to further his education with a specialty in neurosurgery (he’s currently in year six out of seven for his residency). He must also complete one year of a pediatric neurosurgical fellowship to fulfill his sub-specialty interest in pediatric neurosurgery.
Neurosurgery is one of the most challenging branches of surgery, and although Dr. Rolle’s football career is long over, he knows that the sport has taught him a lot about what he needs to succeed in this high-stress field.
“Every surgeon will have losses and your ability to be resilient and learn the lessons that you took from those experiences and apply it to the next time – that’s very helpful and football has taught me that,” Dr. Rolle said in his exclusive interview in “Life After.” “Play the next play, do the next surgery and do it well.”
Dr. Rolle has detailed some of the work he’s done in the operating room on his Instagram. He’s done life-saving brain surgeries as well as implantations surrounding the vertebral body in the spine. He has noted that his interests include traumatic global neurosurgery, trauma, endoscopy for hydrocephalus and congenital spinal deformity.
In terms of the future, once his education is complete, he plans on going global. As a Bahamian-American, he wants to develop neurosurgical services in the Bahamas. He also wants to travel to work in other nations that don’t have accessible health care. “Life After” followed Dr. Rolle on his trip to meet with underprivileged, sick kids in Zambia.
“I want to learn how to save lives in a country like [Zambia] so I can go back to the Bahamas, I can go to Haiti, I can go to Jamaica, I can go to Curacao, I can go to Trinidad and Tobago to practice some of the same medicine,” Dr. Rolle said in his exclusive interview in “Life After.”
