The Pat and Aaron Injury Report 1/12/23 with Dr. Kumar

Voice-over: Sports talk you care about. On your lunch hour, Jay Recher and Zah Blobner, Jay & Z, today at noon. Now back to the Pat and Aaron Show. Mornings on WDAE and streaming live on the free iHeartRadio app.

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Pat Donovan: Pat and Aaron Show, 95.3 WDAE & AM 620. It is now time, as we do every Thursday, to talk with our doctors, our favorite doctors from the Florida Orthopaedic Institute in partnership with Tampa General Hospital. It is the Pat and Aaron Show: Injury Report. Let’s go to one of our favorites, Dr. Kumar on the hotline. Dr. Kumar, how are you doing? Thanks for joining us again.

Dr. Neil Kumar: Hey. Good morning, guys. How are you doing?

Pat: Doing really well. Getting ready for the playoffs here and some of these teams are dealing with some major injuries. The Chargers decided to play Mike Williams, their receiver, last week in a meaningless game. He got hurt and got a back contusion. I’ve heard of contusions before, but when it comes to the back, can you describe what the back contusion looks like?

Dr. Kumar: Yes. A contusion is a general word we use just for any impact injury, usually a soft tissue injury. You can get a bone contusion, what we would describe as a bone bruise, essentially. Fortunately, not a surgical problem, but it can be very painful as anybody with back pain or hurt their back knows that just because it doesn’t need surgery, it doesn’t mean it feels like ponies and rainbows.

He’s a big guy. It’s hard to protect your back at his position from getting hit. Not something that he can always be in a position to go down easily or protect himself, so that can certainly be a big problem.

Pat: Yes. When you talk about that, a guy who, if he does get back on the field, is probably going to take a hit to that back, how much concern is there about reinjury? What is the recovery like before you’re not concerned about anything like that?

Dr. Kumar: That’s a big concern. If he goes through the week, gets his rehab, feels good, but he just keeps getting hit in the wrong spot. He’s jumping up trying to reach for a ball, gets hit full speed by a 225-pound safety right in the wrong spot, that pain can really flare up. Now he might not be ready to go for the rest of the game, and you’re short a guy on game day. That’s always a big concern in terms of reinjury. It’s not just, hey, can he start, but can he actually get through the game?

Pat: Dolphins running back, Rahim Mostert, suffered a broken thumb last week in Week 18. When it comes to running back– First of all, let’s start with this. How does a broken thumb differ from other fingers that you would break?

Dr. Kumar: The thumb is a critical part of a power grip. Obviously, as a running back, it’s very important to hang on to the football. There’s not really a way, again, to protect that. Casts or splints, anything that you put to try to protect that thumb is just going to hinder the ability to carry the football, catch the football, similar to a broken finger for the quarterback, Teddy Bridgewater, who got dealing with a broken pinky, which is the same thing in terms of grip, being able to throw the football. Again, one of those things just for his position is hard to get around.

Pat: We were speaking last week about what happened with DeMar Hamlin and the fact that a lot of times when people suffer situations like that, there’s this whole process of cooling the body and warming the body. Sometimes, it’s days before you really even know what’s going on with that patient neurologically. Considering all of that, how remarkable is it that he’s not even in a hospital this morning?

Dr. Kumar: Yes, that’s pretty amazing. Obviously, the remarkable part about that is just the ability to get his immediate care. As you said, the big question always becomes, obviously they got his heart going and they got him breathing. He needed a lot of assistance there, but the big question will always be, for some period of time, his body, and particularly his brain, was without oxygen, and what effect is that going to have?

It’s still very early. I think the doctors were really clear in their press conferences that he’s himself it appears, which is obviously very fortunate and very, very grateful. The little things in terms of things like memory and cognition and recall and all of those things are still really fine-tuned to make us us, and we don’t know where he’ll be there. We’re obviously very hopeful that he’ll be exactly like he was before he started Monday night, but we just won’t know that for a very long time.

Pat: Yes. It was so important, the immediate attention that he got, the medical attention that he got in, and the medical staff recognizing that this was a cardiac arrest that he was going into. This wasn’t something like a spinal injury or anything like that. This is something different. When it comes to surgeries, and I know sometimes when we’re talking about injuries, we’re not talking about life or death like we were with DeMar Hamlin, how often does and how critical is it to make sure that before you go into surgery, that you have everything that you are intending to do and fix up the injury, right? Correct.

Does it happen ever that you guys think there’s a problem and you think what the problem is and you go and you fix in your eyes, “Well, actually wasn’t the problem that we were looking for?”

Dr. Kumar: Yes, I mean, it does happen certainly and it’s part of surgical planning. I mean, when we do surgery, obviously, it’s myself on the phone with you, but surgery is a team sport. Just like the medical care he got, just like a sports team. You can’t do it with just one person. It takes everyone, it takes the surgeon, it takes the anesthesia team. It takes every single person working in the operating room. A lot of times for orthopedic surgeons, we use a lot of different devices to fix things, so to speak. All of those instruments and implants, they have to be ready.

We like to say, “Hey, we obviously have a plan A going to surgery, but we always like to have a plan A, B, C, double Z,” because sometimes we get in there and there’s more damage. There’s less damage. Even if the problem is the problem, not everybody’s injury is the same. Sometimes the way we have to have to fix things is different per patient. A meniscus tear is something probably a lot of listeners have heard of, but not all tears are the same. The way we treat it has to be very individual and we have to be ready for that. That’s the standard part of surgical care, or any care really.

Pat: Dr. Kumar, let’s go back to finger injuries. How do I know, how would somebody know?

Aaron: Oh, where’s the Titanic music when we need it?

Pat: How would somebody with a finger injury know? Let’s say they’re five weeks into it, right? They think everything’s progressing. Everything looks good, but now that person, not me, is worried about staph infection.

Dr. Kumar: Yes.

Pat: That’s a real worry, right?

Dr. Kumar: That is a real worry. I assume we’re not speaking from personal experience, just a hypothetical situation.

Pat: It’s a friend of mine.

Aaron: A hypochondriac situation more importantly.

Dr. Kumar: Right. Yes. Hey, it’s just like any, hey, you get a paper cut. We’ve all had these small, a little nick, and we just have some idea of how they should be progressing and some general idea of a normal timeline. I tell patients, “Hey, we are going straight down the highway and anytime we think we’re turning a little left and we’re going a little bit off course, it’s never a bad idea to get it checked out.” Sometimes it’s just a simple check, “Hey, it’s going to heal a little slower. Hey, what we thought was a small little nick, a little more than what we thought is just going to take a little more time. That’s quick, that’s easy. A peace of mind, no problem.”

It’s also great that if there is something that needs to be done large or small, it gets handled early, and that usually means treatment goes faster better outcomes. We just jump on the problem.

Pat: If it’s Aaron, I give any doctor full permission to tell him to just stop being a pee and go home.

Dr. Kumar: Yes. We just won’t let him through the door.

Pat: Because I mean, my friend has been very tired lately and he wonders if that is if staph infection leads to fatigue.

Dr. Kumar: Yes. That hasn’t been proven now, but there’s always a one-of-one out there.

Pat: All right. We’ll see. I’ll let my friend know. Thank you, Dr. Kumar. Really appreciate it.

Aaron: Do you know if Hypochondriasm, [crosstalk] being a hypochondriac causes fatigue?

Dr. Kumar: Yes, you know what? I’m not going to comment on that. Just going to say probably not the right doctor to have on the phone for that.

Pat: The Pat and Aaron Show: Injury Report presented by Tampa General Hospital in partnership with Florida Orthopaedic Institute, providing you access to one of the top orthopedic programs in the nation. I am a patient there, and you should be as well. If you’re dealing with an injury, schedule an appointment today at floridaortho.com. Dr. Kumar, always a pleasure. Thanks for joining us.

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