The forward for the West Coast Eagles was experiencing symptoms of what he believed to be gastro. He was traveling to Adelaide for a match against the Crows.
For a few days, Waterman told the ABC, “the plumbing wasn’t very good there.”
It wasn’t bad enough to prevent me from leaving the house; I could still travel and be at ease; I just needed to be cautious.
“When I started panicking was when I was getting real nauseous, and started vomiting and whatnot.”
The 25-year old spoke to the Eagles doctors and withdrew from the clash with Adelaide and flew home, where it had become clear he wasn’t suffering from a run-of-the-mill illness.
“‘I’ve had bouts of gastro and food poisoning stuff before and it was a little bit different, because I wasn’t as as sick but I had these lingering symptoms,” Waterman said.
“I flew home from the Adelaide game and the next day, the next morning I felt okay and I thought, well I might have got through whatever it was.
“Then that night and then the next morning was no good, couldn’t sleep, was sick, had all the symptoms that someone would expect for someone with a bit of IBD [inflammatory bowel disease].”
He went to hospital, and spent 10 days getting treated. He can’t remember the first few days.
“I was just so out of it. I was nowhere,” he said.
“I probably spent most of it sleeping, in tremendous amounts of pain.”
Specialists started searching for what was causing his IBD, with Waterman eventually diagnosed with ulcerative colitis, an auto-immune condition which causes inflammation of the lower parts of the digestive system.
“Once we found out that, it was straight onto medication and how we can get you feeling better in the short term, and then with also having an eye on the long term, what that’s going to look like,” he said.
‘Anything to feel normal again’
In the back of his mind was an eventual return to the Eagles and the AFL, but he had other priorities early on.
“You do anything to feel normal again,” he said.
“So I’m just like ‘nah, I don’t need to play football … just get me normal again’.
