“I know I had a large vocabulary but now I had a hard time reaching for it. That’s how I know something was wrong,” he said of that period. “And then I’d get in these states where I’d be comatose two or three days, unable to move.”

Soon after Hendrickson received a job arranged by his former Chargers teammate, kicker John Carney, Lewis got an alarmed phone call one evening.

“He did really fine for three days and then all of a sudden, John calls me and says, ‘He didn’t show!’” she remembered. “So I called Steve and he said ‘(expletive), I forgot to go!’ I asked where he was at and he said, ‘I’m at the movies.’”

The breaking point came in 2006 when Hendrickson found work as a soil specialist, only to have his new job fall apart within days. Tasks he learned one day would flee his brain the next — if extreme fatigue didn’t confine him to bed first.

“They would train me on one thing one day, and then they’d have to retrain me on the same thing the next day — and I would swear to God they’d never showed me or taught me that,” he said. “But there were some things that I’d retain; I was one of the only guys they had who passed the materials testing. And then I’d go out in the field, and completely forget the process — even if it was written down.”