The Pat and Aaron Injury Report 12/1/22 with Dr. Kumar

Aaron: Pat and Aaron Show, 953WDAE and AM 620, let’s go now to the Friendly Kia DAE hotline, where Dr. Neil Kumar awaits as we get ready for our segment with The Florida Orthopaedic Institute in partnership with Tampa General Hospital. It is the injury report and we do, we look forward to it every week because we got to find out some of the players that are being impacted on this Buccaneers team. Also, players around the league could impact your fantasy lineups, and even more importantly, you might be dealing with an injury like this yourself, and they’re the perfect doctors to help you.

Dr. Kumar, how are you doing this morning?

Dr. Kumar: Hey, good morning fellas. How are you?

Aaron: Doing better than some players around the league right now dealing with some injuries, and I want to start right here in Tampa Bay actually with our All-Pro right tackle Tristan Wirfs. We’ve heard he is expected to miss three to four weeks, but we know it’s that high ankle injury and we know how dangerous that high ankle injury can be and the impact it can have. Thankfully, X-rays were negative. Is three to four weeks too optimistic, doctor?

Dr. Kumar: No, that’s a pretty typical timeline. The high ankle joint has a few different ligaments to support it, so it always depends on just how severe the injury is. We know that some of the players, Tua Tagovailoa is a pretty well-known example of high ankle joint injuries that are really serious and required surgery. Fortunately, most of them don’t, and it doesn’t sound like his requires it. Three to four weeks is a pretty typical timeline to start testing it out.

Pat: How much does it matter, the size of the human being we’re talking about? Is it easier for somebody like Aaron Jacobson’s size to get over an ankle injury than somebody who’s a behemoth of a man like Tristan Wirfs?

Dr. Kumar: Well, I don’t know if Tristan and Aaron cut it up on the field, he’s pretty good.

Aaron: Thank you. Thank you, doctor.

Dr. Kumar: Pressure out through that ankle. No, obviously Tristan’s a big guy, and taking a lot of force when he plays with just a big guy is hitting him. That makes a big deal. It also matters what your position is. If you’re a running back receiver, someone who used to exploding, changing directions very quickly, that makes a big deal as well. It just depends, like you said, on who the person is and what position they play.

Aaron: Philadelphia Eagles safety CJ Gardner Johnson, who’s having a great season, he’s out indefinitely after suffering a lacerated kidney, and that just hurts everything, hurts my whole body, just hearing lacerated kidney.

Pat: Seriously.

Aaron: How does this injury even occur sometimes, doctor?

Dr. Kumar: Yes. A lot of times it’s just direct contact to the side or to the low back. Obviously, these guys are flying around. It’s a lot of force going around and you can’t always protect that area, particularly in vulnerable positions, and the receiver or defensive back, you can see that a lot. It’s a pretty serious injury. He’s out indefinitely and I don’t think they have any timeline on when he might be back.

Pat: Obviously in sports, we’re so concerned with muscles and bones and ligaments and that sort of thing. How does someone know, how do the Eagles trainers or whoever know to look at a kidney? What are the signs that, “Hey, you could have an internal organ injury as opposed to one of those muscles or bones or ligaments?”

Dr. Kumar: Yes, absolutely so. The first thing is obviously these guys are tough guys. If their pain is getting to a level, the trainers know these guys, hey, when they get beat up during the games or practice, you know how long it takes for them to get better. They’ll be able to spot, this is not a normal response for this particular player. For a kidney issue, if it’s really serious, sometimes they’ll even urinate blood and that’s sometimes can even be the first sign of something obviously going wrong. Usually those two things, the trainers for our teams and even just on our local high school level, they know the guys and they know what’s normal for them and what’s not.

Aaron: If you are urinating blood, you make sure to reach out to our friends at the Florida Orthopaedic Institute in Partnership with Tampa General Hospital. You have a problem. [laughs] Lacerations. When we talk about internal organs, and Pat, asking a good question of how can you tell that? What other internal organs decide? I’ve actually heard the kidney before. What else, if anything internally do you see that gets lacerated?

Dr. Kumar: Yes. The spleen is another one that we’ll see in football. We have a pretty famous local example with Chris Simms when he was playing with the Buccs and he got hit at halftime and they found out later in the game, they had to go to the hospital obviously, and had a big serious issue. The spleen is obviously another one that you can hear it in contact sport.

Pat: With the lungs you just see punctures from time to time, right?

Dr. Kumar: Yes. usually from rib fractures. Obviously, those two areas are right on top of each other, right on top of each other. If you get hit hard enough, not a lot of protection between a broken rib and the lung field in, so sometimes we’ll see that in that situation.

Pat: Bears safety Eddie Jackson is dealing with what looks like a significant Lisfranc injury. We’ve talked about this before, but it’s one of those things that we hear about and I don’t think we always– I know I certainly don’t always understand exactly what that means. Refresh our minds for our listeners about the Lisfranc injury and what makes it, first of all, so difficult to recover from because it’s one of those things that it lingers a lot, right?

Dr. Kumar: Oh, absolutely, yes. Lisfrancs are a big deal, particularly for our athletes and pushing off on the foot. The Lisfranc joint of your foot, think of it like the knuckle bones in your hand. You’ve got similar knuckle bones, so to speak, in your foot and essentially where your toes and your knuckle bones meet the rest of your foot and there’s just a lot of force and a lot of pressure going through a very small part of your body.

Those ligaments are very strong and it takes a lot of force to hurt them and that’s also why it’s a big deal. Usually, Lisfranc injuries are season-ending injuries and long-term injuries. While they don’t always need surgery, a lot of them might require it. Recovery’s pretty messy so yes, it’s a big deal that Lisfranc injuries.

Aaron: Before we let you go, Dr. Kumar, I want to ask you about Pro Bowl running back Najee Harris who is dealing with an abdominal injury. What are some of the different type of abdominal injuries that we see out there?

Dr. Kumar: Yes. We talked about them a couple already with the spleen and kidney, sometimes we’ll hear sports hernia, that’s a common phrase that we might hear around. That’s injury to some of the ab muscles, so to speak, some of the core muscles that sometimes can get hurt just like pulling a calf, pulling a quad muscle, and sometimes even those require surgery. But those are the three big ones. The sports hernia one is something that folks might have heard of about before.

Aaron: Personally, how concerned are you as a man from Buffalo or from the New York area, [laughs] how concerned are you about Josh Allen?

Dr. Kumar: I’m not concerned about his elbow. It looks like his elbow is holding up. Now about the rest of the team and how choppy Dave looked in the last few weeks no comment.

[laughter]

Aaron: Well, we always love hearing your comments on everything else and love having you on the show. He is Dr. Neil Kumar in the Pat and Aaron Show injury report presented by Tampa General Hospital and partnership with Florida Orthopaedic Institute. They provide you access to one of the top orthopedic programs in the nation. We’ll continue to tell you, we have listeners reach out to us every week telling us that they got fixed up at the Florida Orthopaedic Institute in partnership with Tampa General Hospital and it changed their lives, and that can happen for you as well. If you’re dealing with that injury, schedule that appointment today, Floridaortho.com.

Dr. Kumar, thanks so much. Always love having you on.

Dr. Kumar: Hey, have a good morning, fellas.

Pat: Thanks doc.

Aaron: You as well. Yes, no comment from the doctor, but man, some of these injuries and he brought up Chris Simms with the spleen and the lacerated kidney. When I see lacerated, I think it’s because of what happened to Chris Simms. Anytime I see lacerated anything, when it’s an internal organ, it freaks me out.

Pat: It just sounds terrible.

Aaron: It sounds terrible, it freaks me out.

Pat: It sounds like something you could miss.