"Obviously, with how I feel now, he was 100% right in what he did. It's great for me to have so much trust, and to know that, hopefully nothing ever comes up again, but if it does, that I have somebody like him in my corner."
It wasn't just the player taking heat for his choice; some questioned the expertise of ElAttrache. But Brady, who owns a home in L.A., where he typically spends much of his free time, said he never doubted the ability or judgment of his doctor.
"Neal was dead on with what he was doing," the quarterback said in a telephone interview. "I felt he got dragged into a lot of stuff that wasn't his fault at all. He kept his composure.
"I chose Neal because that was my decision. There are great doctors all over the world, and Neal was right for me. My father always told me tall trees experience high winds, and I think Neal is a person that, when you're at the top of your profession, you can weather a lot of those storms. I think his true colors really shined through."
Among the remarkable things about Brady, ElAttrache said, was his interest in knowing every last detail about the surgery and his recovery timeline. The doctor said he eventually had to "loosen the reins and let him go a little bit."
Said ElAttrache: "Let's face it, guys that are athletes like him, they're strung together different. By and large, they follow the same biologic rules as the rest of us. However, they're able to do things with their neuromuscular control, and their strength gains, and how they respond to exercise a little bit differently. Within safe limits of how we know how these things heal after an operation like this, I had to take that into consideration."
Even after the infection, Brady said, neither he nor ElAttrache allowed themselves to ponder the possibility of the quarterback sitting out the 2009 season.
"I don't think either of us ever thought that," Brady said. "Look, you have a surgery and you have setbacks, you have good days and bad days. That's part of life, that's part of the process, so you've just got to work through them. When you have a great group of supporters that I have in my friends, my family and certainly Neal, you get through to the next day. You're always working on getting better.
"I'm never a person that dwells on things that aren't going well. I just say, 'OK, it happened. How are we going to deal with it?' If you're sitting there focusing on feeling bad for yourself, you're just wasting a lot of energy on stuff that's not helping you get better."
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