MaineBoy
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Just found this on Philly site...seems to be most complete report I have seen yet:
Head athletic trainer Rick Burkholder explained the timetable and discovery phase of Terrell Owens' ankle injury and the announcement that he will need surgery:
"To best tell you about T.O.'s injury, I will take you through the sequence. Last night (Sunday) you all saw the replay. He got tackled from the side, or from behind, had an external rotation forced to his ankle. We got him to the locker room. He had medial ankle pain or pain on the inside of his ankle, no knee pain. Took him to x-ray, he cleared the x-rays of his ankle, we reexamined him after the game, still had no knee pain. Had no real high ankle sprain signs, he just had a lot of swelling on the medial side of his ankle.
"And then, as Coach (Andy Reid) reported, he had this big episode of swelling and he had a medial ankle sprain. He had an 8:30 MRI scheduled this morning, we put him on crutches and a boot.
"He reported here to NovaCare this morning and he had some pain in his mid lower leg, as well as in the medial side of his ankle. So, when we got the MRI, we asked them to shoot the whole leg to make sure that we weren't missing anything up top. When the MRI came back, he did have a deltoid ligament sprain, which is what we saw all the bleeding from last night. He had no damage that looked like a high ankle sprain in those ligaments that we normally see damaged.
"However, he does have a fracture of his fibula, about centimeters below his knee. Anytime you see a sign like that, you see this fracture, what we call an oblique fracture so it kind of spirals up, we know that he had some unbelievable force at his ankle that transmitted up through his fibula and fractured it.
"Immediately, Dr. (Peter) DeLuca, who has been handling that case, realized that this is something that the ankle specialist needed to see and we used Dr. Mark Myerson in Baltimore. As soon as T.O. came back from MRI, we sent him down to Dr. Myerson in Baltimore and that is when I reported to you this morning that we needed to do more testing. What they did testing wise was they actually put T.O. to sleep just like for surgery and they externally rotated his ankle like what happened to him in the injury last night while he was asleep to see whether those bones widened.
"They did widen, so he is going to need a surgery to repair that. He is going to need what is called a syndesmotic screw put through both bones in his ankle to stabilize that joint. That screw is pretty big. It goes through the fibula and the tibia and it stabilizes the joint. The fracture up high, the fracture that we saw ten centimeters below his knee, that is going to heel up on it's own and that is not really the issue. When we saw that, we knew something else was going on in his ankle other than this deltoid sprain and so that was our red flag to get him into the hands of an ankle specialist.
"Those ankle specialists, when they do the x-ray, they put them to sleep and they have to know just how much to turn that ankle so they don't do more damage. That is why Dr. Myerson was our choice. It is not, everybody is going to say, a second opinion. That's our procedure, we take it as far as our docs can take it and then we turn it over to a specialist.
"He is in great hands. T.O. is on his way back from Baltimore. The surgery is scheduled for Wednesday. We want to get that thing repaired as quickly as possible. Like I said, we are going to let the high fibular fracture go and we are just going stabilize that joint.
"The obvious question from everybody is what does this mean to his season? What does this mean to his career? Normally it takes a little longer for that to heel. You want the screw to sit in there long enough to stabilize the soft tissue.
"At three weeks, we are going to test him out a little bit. We are going to put him on a bike, put him in the pool, let him run. If everything goes well in the surgery, at three weeks we will do that. We will send him back down to Dr. Myerson and let him check him.
"If everything is going well and he is heeling up, at five weeks there is a chance he can run. Seven weeks from yesterday is Super Bowl Sunday. If things would work out, there is an outside chance that he can be prepared to play in that game in some role. There are a lot of hurdles that have to be taken on before he can ever get to that point.
"Right now the first thing is we need to get him stabilized on Wednesday and hopefully everything will go well. He will be in rehab with us. We will take it day by day, week by week and just hope for the best."
Head athletic trainer Rick Burkholder explained the timetable and discovery phase of Terrell Owens' ankle injury and the announcement that he will need surgery:
"To best tell you about T.O.'s injury, I will take you through the sequence. Last night (Sunday) you all saw the replay. He got tackled from the side, or from behind, had an external rotation forced to his ankle. We got him to the locker room. He had medial ankle pain or pain on the inside of his ankle, no knee pain. Took him to x-ray, he cleared the x-rays of his ankle, we reexamined him after the game, still had no knee pain. Had no real high ankle sprain signs, he just had a lot of swelling on the medial side of his ankle.
"And then, as Coach (Andy Reid) reported, he had this big episode of swelling and he had a medial ankle sprain. He had an 8:30 MRI scheduled this morning, we put him on crutches and a boot.
"He reported here to NovaCare this morning and he had some pain in his mid lower leg, as well as in the medial side of his ankle. So, when we got the MRI, we asked them to shoot the whole leg to make sure that we weren't missing anything up top. When the MRI came back, he did have a deltoid ligament sprain, which is what we saw all the bleeding from last night. He had no damage that looked like a high ankle sprain in those ligaments that we normally see damaged.
"However, he does have a fracture of his fibula, about centimeters below his knee. Anytime you see a sign like that, you see this fracture, what we call an oblique fracture so it kind of spirals up, we know that he had some unbelievable force at his ankle that transmitted up through his fibula and fractured it.
"Immediately, Dr. (Peter) DeLuca, who has been handling that case, realized that this is something that the ankle specialist needed to see and we used Dr. Mark Myerson in Baltimore. As soon as T.O. came back from MRI, we sent him down to Dr. Myerson in Baltimore and that is when I reported to you this morning that we needed to do more testing. What they did testing wise was they actually put T.O. to sleep just like for surgery and they externally rotated his ankle like what happened to him in the injury last night while he was asleep to see whether those bones widened.
"They did widen, so he is going to need a surgery to repair that. He is going to need what is called a syndesmotic screw put through both bones in his ankle to stabilize that joint. That screw is pretty big. It goes through the fibula and the tibia and it stabilizes the joint. The fracture up high, the fracture that we saw ten centimeters below his knee, that is going to heel up on it's own and that is not really the issue. When we saw that, we knew something else was going on in his ankle other than this deltoid sprain and so that was our red flag to get him into the hands of an ankle specialist.
"Those ankle specialists, when they do the x-ray, they put them to sleep and they have to know just how much to turn that ankle so they don't do more damage. That is why Dr. Myerson was our choice. It is not, everybody is going to say, a second opinion. That's our procedure, we take it as far as our docs can take it and then we turn it over to a specialist.
"He is in great hands. T.O. is on his way back from Baltimore. The surgery is scheduled for Wednesday. We want to get that thing repaired as quickly as possible. Like I said, we are going to let the high fibular fracture go and we are just going stabilize that joint.
"The obvious question from everybody is what does this mean to his season? What does this mean to his career? Normally it takes a little longer for that to heel. You want the screw to sit in there long enough to stabilize the soft tissue.
"At three weeks, we are going to test him out a little bit. We are going to put him on a bike, put him in the pool, let him run. If everything goes well in the surgery, at three weeks we will do that. We will send him back down to Dr. Myerson and let him check him.
"If everything is going well and he is heeling up, at five weeks there is a chance he can run. Seven weeks from yesterday is Super Bowl Sunday. If things would work out, there is an outside chance that he can be prepared to play in that game in some role. There are a lot of hurdles that have to be taken on before he can ever get to that point.
"Right now the first thing is we need to get him stabilized on Wednesday and hopefully everything will go well. He will be in rehab with us. We will take it day by day, week by week and just hope for the best."
