FuzzyLumpkins;1523650 said:
Even if he only has damage to the nerve sheathing it still would seem that he has no chance to come back. nerve damage takes forever to heal.
my brother had a lamenectomy which is a fusion of the vertebrae and the surgeon caused some nerve damage. The actual hardware and fusion went fine but even after 5 years he still deals with excruciating pain although it has lessened severely from when the labrum was first damaged.
Now im not saying that Rivera is nearly as bad off as he is but the nerves are going to stay damaged for quite some time.
Sorry about him. The usual cause of nerve problems with backs are from crush. You can have injury during surgery but usually you get a crush which is more a squeeze from surrounding elements be it bone, connective tissue or disc. Of course scar tissue and injection can also cause problems.
With the chronic compression u get pain as the part of the spine carrying a load of pain fibers often gets involved by being in the vicinity of the causal problem. Crush it long enough and you get atrophy which causes weakness in the motor neuron to muscle units it supplies. The muscles finally atrophy and the nerve somewhere along that line get atrophied enough to never come back. They get white and pale and smaller with less vessels.
It doesn't always have to get that bad. The earlier you reverse the crush the less likely permanent damage or at lease you can stop it and allow it to struggle back towards normal.
So its not inevitable to get nerve damage then nerve and muscle atrophy but it happens too often.
Dorsal problems affect the chord differently due to size differences in the thoracic areas of note and the symptoms patients get from it. But the surgical approaches are much more dangerous there and the incident of spinal injury is vastly higher and more dangerous including paralysis. The cervical area has a better suggest rate but has its caveats as well. It's an interesting field and they've come a long way period and esp for athletes.
Depending on the area and causations then you can expect certain problems. Mostly though they can get to neuronal injury soon enough to avoid too much muscle atrophy allowing the pro to be able to bounce back.
Remember the larger the nerve and muscle the more attentuated the problems will be. The pro has a better chance of fighting thru them as the relative damage to a huge muscle is temperating. And rehabb is getting better with e-stim, muscle training, as well as pt and other rehab. And players get happier with knowing there chancd is high and can be favorably influenced by working long and hard.
Ususally severe pain in an older process is not necessarily a bad sign but its not as good as more conventional pain.
Hope this helps some. I'd rather havd a achilles tendon injury at the insertion now than a few years ago than a back injury esp the second sx. Everyone is different.
BTW Ellis has an excellent chance of playing well this year. I expect no fall off and he should improve his skills over last year. Again can't guarantee all will go well but there is no good reason to not be expecting Ellis to play and start at OLB.
Go Boys.
