Photo: Winslow Townson/USA Today

Last week, the Patriots began bringing back a few of their own free agents, but it’s been a pretty quiet offseason thus far.

One of those guys coming back is James White. White, who suffered a hip subluxation a year ago, has been slowly returning to normal. Not football normal, but to a normal life.

“I think as the months have gone on. I’ve gotten better and better mentally,” White told reporters via Zoom on Monday morning. “Being kind of confined to a bed for the first few months, not really being able to move around and do things for myself, you think to yourself, ‘how could I ever run and move and all that stuff ever again?’ but obviously as the months go on and things start to loosen up, you start moving around and doing some fo the normal things you’re used to doing, you build that confidence back over again.

“I’m in a good spot right now, I’m just going to keep progressing and take it one day at a time.”

White said he only recently started walking about two months ago, which means it’s hard to imagine he’ll be ready to roll for training camp.

“I could always get up and move crutches and move around at first, but I’d say the first two or three months I wasn’t doing too much,” White said. “I wasn’t doing too much moving besides maybe going to the kitchen and coming back and laying back down, things of that nature. I’d say over the past two, two-and-a-half months, I’ve started walking or so and kind of getting back doing normal exercise.

“I’ve been getting better and better, feeling pretty good.”

White’s children did help provide quite a bit of motivation to get dad up and moving at times as well.

“It was definitely challenging, but I got to spend some extra time with them and my son would always hand me my crutches whenever he wanted me to get up and move around,” White said with a grin.

“It put a lot of stress on my wife for sure. She had to handle 99.9% of the stuff. I couldn’t really do much, besides when my daughter wasn’t walking she could sit there and I could hold her in the bed while she did something with my son…it was definitely a trying time but good to get some extra time with them.”

As far as coming back, White didn’t really know if it was going to be an option or not, but between his doctor’s confidence and the confidence Bill Belichick’s has in him, ultimately it was an easy call.

“Every few months, I’d go back to Foxborough and visit the surgeon and things of that nature and hearing what he had to say to me and saying I didn’t have to worry too much about re-injuring this same hip again, it’d kind of be like starting all over again,” White explained. That helped me build some confidence knowing me going back out there and playing doesn’t put me at greater risk having another hip injury. I was open to anything. I didn’t really know what my free agency market was going to be like, whether anyone would want to “take a chance on me” and things of that nature.

“Bill had the confidence and wanted me back, so that was important to me. To still be wanted after something like this is definitely something that’s helped me out a lot.”