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Among the hundreds of thousands of Philadelphia fans eager to see how the Eagles and their fragile quarterback fare in Buffalo on Sunday is a former player who has endured physical torment far beyond a hand contusion and a mild concussion.

No offense to Michael Vick, but those afflictions would register as mere nuisances for former Eagles linebacker and special teams player Kevin Reilly.

Sporting a California tan and an all-American smile, Reilly looks the part of a former professional athlete, but what is most noticeable about the youthful-looking 60-year-old is his left shirt sleeve, which hangs empty.

The absence of that limb has defined Reilly's life -- for the worst, initially, and now for the better.

He is a Delaware native who starred at Villanova University before being selected by the Miami Dolphins in the seventh round of the 1973 NFL draft. He played three seasons of professional football, the first two with the Eagles and the last with the New England Patriots.

In 1976, Reilly was diagnosed with a desmoid tumor, a cancer of the scar tissue, which, he said, has "one bad property. It never stops growing. It doesn't know when to check itself."

The diagnosis essentially ended Reilly's NFL career, but the worst was still to come. Three years later, he underwent surgery to remove his left arm, shoulder and five ribs in an attempt to rid his body of the cancer. The procedure altered his body and his life radically, forcing Reilly to face not just life without football, but life without a limb.

Until that point, the hometown hero who played for his beloved Eagles enjoyed a charmed existence. He and his wife, former Miss Delaware Catherine Lawton, had three children -- Brett Reilly, Erin Stein and Brie Heggan.

"A lot of people were envious of us," Reilly said. "Here I am, a pro football player. She's a beauty queen. And you would have thought we would have lived life happily ever after. But it all came unraveled."

The cancer was the snag that precipitated his descent. It started with surgery in November 1976, about a year after he played his last game for the Patriots.

"They thought [the tumor] was benign," Reilly said of the prognosis that motivated him to begin training for a comeback to football.

The comeback would be short-lived. When lifting weights, Reilly noticed a little bubble would pop up on his shoulder. He sought advice from about 10 doctors, each of whom poked, prodded … and remained befuddled.

While other medical experts struggled to diagnose the problem, Dr. Ralph Marcove, an orthopedic surgeon at Manhattan's Memorial Sloan-Kettering, took less than a minute to determine that Reilly was suffering from a desmoid tumor. Soon thereafter, Marcove operated and removed Reilly's shoulder blade.

"Unfortunately, he didn't get all of the tumor out the first time," Reilly said. "It came back again with a vengeance."

Over a two-month period, Reilly was in such relentless pain that he would drink a bottle of wine nearly every night in an attempt to sleep. Additional surgery to remove his arm, shoulder and five ribs was his only hope.

"I couldn't live like that," he said. "If I had to lose my arm, I was willing to do that to be out of the pain."

In October 1979, Reilly was admitted to the hospital for another surgery. An hour before he was to go into the operating room, he signed a one-page document that listed his chances of surviving the procedure at 67 percent.

"Your perspective changes a lot when you know you could be faced with meeting your creator in the next hour," he said.

Eleven-and-a-half hours later, Reilly emerged from surgery a changed man.

"I began asking myself, 'What am I going to do for a living? How am I going to change diapers? How do I type? I'll never be able to drive a car again,'" he said.

Reilly's depression was worsening when he received a phone call from Pittsburgh Steelers halfback Rocky Bleier.

Bleier had something in common with Reilly that was more significant than football. While serving in Vietnam, Bleier had been shot in the leg.

"Doctors gave him a 50-50 chance of ever walking again without a limb," Reilly said. "They tried to talk him into fusing his leg at the knee at the hospital in Germany, and he wouldn't have it done. The owner of the Pittsburgh Steelers, Art Rooney, gave him two years to rehab. Not only did Bleier make the team, but he came back and won four Super Bowl rings."

Reilly recalled Bleier's instructions: "He said to me, with a passion I remember to this day, 'You must promise me something. You must promise me you will not quit on something unless you try it at least three times.'"

When Reilly hesitated, Bleier sent him a poem, "A Winner's Creed," and asked Reilly to commit it to memory and recite it whenever he struggled with a task. That strategy, combined with a faith in God and support from friends and family, worked.

Reilly learned how to knot his own tie and embarked on what would become a 30-year career with Xerox. He turned to non-contact sports; he has run in five half-marathons and broken 90 on the golf course on two occasions, helped by some advice he picked up from a few women's professional golfers he met at charity events.

"A couple of the gals from the LPGA showed me that the game is all about rhythm," Reilly said. "Some of them are not too big as athletes. You will find them 5-foot-5, 125 pounds, yet they are knocking the ball past the 240-pound linebacker because they are hitting with rhythm.

"So when I slowed everything down I actually started to play better golf than I ever did with two arms."

When not pounding the pavement or hitting the links, Reilly, now retired from Xerox, is a sports radio broadcaster, appearing on Eagles' pregame and postgame shows. He also does motivational speaking, sharing his story with cancer patients and recuperating soldiers.

He is in the process of writing a book about his experience with cancer. The underlying message is one of hope.

"I want readers to say look what can happen to you, any of us, and how you reinvent yourself. How do you step back after a tragedy, after a divorce, after a bad illness and understand what you need to do to continue to go after your dreams?" he said.

While cancer changed his life, Reilly holds no bitterness about all it took from him.

"Honestly, the day I got out of Sloan-Kettering, if someone put a five-year life agreement out there, I would have signed it because I didn't know where I was going and whether the cancer was coming back," he said. "This year, I celebrated my 60th birthday. I'm the luckiest guy in the world."

Christopher Kazarian is a freelance writer based in Massachusetts.