When you’re a professional athlete, you expect to deal with bumps and bruises every now and then. A strain here, a sprain there, it all comes with the territory.

What you don’t expect is to wake up one morning with a blown up leg that requires multiple stays in the hospital.

That’s the situation Tyler O’Neill found himself in over the past week or so.

Having already come down with a stomach virus, O’Neill also developed an infection in his leg that he said hospitalized him for a total of five days. He was first admitted during last week’s road series in Kansas City, and after flying home with the team he was admitted again to Mass General Hospital on Saturday, where he stayed until Tuesday.

“Pretty scary for a couple of days,” O’Neill said. “The MGH doctors and medical staff over there took really good care of me over the weekend into yesterday, so feeling a lot better, happy to be back on my feet.”

O’Neill declined to go into the specifics on what kind of infection he was dealing with, but he said it came out of nowhere and that nobody is sure if there was any connection between the leg issue and his prior illness.

“Totally unexpected, I have no idea how it happened,” O’Neill said. “I had to get on antibiotics right away, get on a drip for a little bit, and I’m just thankful to everyone who was involved in getting me back on the right foot.”

The Red Sox outfielder said that during his time in the hospital he didn’t get in any physical activity at all. He said he’s lost a couple of pounds, but he was able to get back on the field a bit on Tuesday afternoon and resumed baseball activities on Wednesday.

Red Sox manager Alex Cora said O’Neill will travel with the team to Baltimore, and while it’s unlikely he’ll play in the upcoming Orioles series, they’ll take things day by day and see how his body responds.

“I’ll be surprised if he does play in Baltimore, but you never know,” Cora said. “He’s a grinder, he wants to play, so we’ll see how it goes today and tomorrow.”