Erik Tolman was hopped up on painkillers, staring down at a mangled knee that now turned in the wrong direction and a foot that he could no longer feel. After recovering from two elbow surgeries across three years, the Washington Nationals left-hander found himself back in a hospital bed, all because he hopped over the foul line on his way to the mound and landed awkwardly.He wished for peace. Even more than that, he says with disappointment rather than anger, he wished the nurses had kept their voices down.The artery that delivered blood to his foot was pinched off. Unable to relocate it while at the field or in the ambulance, doctors weighed options for an extremity that had been without oxygen for quite some time — long enough that the nurses in the corner of the emergency room started to whisper.They were talking about amputating part of Tolman’s leg.“I mean,” Tolman said, “my life flashed before my eyes.”Exactly 1,117 days after Tolman thought he was going to lose his right foot, he brushed it across a big-league mound in Miami, a 27-year-old rookie debuting with a substantial brace over his right stirrup sock.Doctors eventually reached the artery in time. How close of a call it was, Tolman still isn’t sureAt the time, all he knew was that he was alone, afraid and in pain. His parents were hundreds of miles away, and he had a torn ACL, LCL, PCL, calf, hamstring and meniscus, as well as a paralyzed foot.“I was embarrassed,” Tolman said. “I was coming back from two Tommy Johns. I’ve always taken pride in how athletic I was. And then for something like that to happen — I mean, it shook me. It shook me.”After every hour he had ever played and every pitch he had ever thrown, Tolman did not want to be defined as the 14th-rounder whose career ended because his cleat got caught in the turf.“It caused me to get focused again,” said Tolman, who hasn’t allowed a run in three outings with the Nationals. “I didn’t want that to be the end of my career. No way. There was no way.”‘Am I ever going to be able to walk normally again?’Most of the doctors told Tolman to get real.This, they stressed, would be an abnormal rehab. Maybe he could play baseball at some level again, but he wouldn’t be a big leaguer. Heck, they first needed to figure out if he could walk.Three surgeries were spread out across 11 months. He saw specialists who worked on skiers and snowboarders, because that was the closest parallel to his injury. They decompressed the nerve, then repaired the LCL, then reattached the hamstring to the bone, then went back to fix the ACL. To keep Tolman’s foot from drooping, they moved a muscle from the back of his leg to the front. At times, he exercised with a makeshift tourniquet on his leg, which was as painful as it sounds.And so, for a long stretch, no one talked about baseball.“He never gave up,” said Nick Thurlow, his physical therapist. “But he was also like … ‘I just want to be able to have a functional life and be able to run with my kids one day.’”