Football Medical Question

[dyeguy21]

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So people who are in-tune with American Football know that Dallas Cowboys QB Tony Romo went in to play with an apparently fractured rib and PUNCTURED lung.

I am curious how this is possible and if the "puncture" is for real as we were taught in systems that a punctured lung=pneumothorax

I get that he can play with fractured ribs and a bruised lung, but I'd find it hard to believe that the delicate play between pressures in the lung wouldn't be massively upset by a leaky spot.

Am I missing something or just taking an oversimplified view of a punctured lung?

 

[Kevin Baker]

So people who are in-tune with American Football know that Dallas Cowboys QB Tony Romo went in to play with an apparently fractured rib and PUNCTURED lung.

I am curious how this is possible and if the "puncture" is for real as we were taught in systems that a punctured lung=pneumothorax

I get that he can play with fractured ribs and a bruised lung, but I'd find it hard to believe that the delicate play between pressures in the lung wouldn't be massively upset by a leaky spot.

Am I missing something or just taking an oversimplified view of a punctured lung?

Stephania Bell has a decent writeup on injuries every week on ESPN.

By my understanding, the puncture was so small, and the leakage so little, that the pressure difference in the lungs wasn't upset that much, and while Romo couldn't expand his affected lung as much as he normally could, he was able to expand it enough to play. There are differing degrees of pneumothorax. Some will kill you if left untreated. Some you won't notice.

 

[colbgw02]

It's very common in blunt trauma to have a very tiny pneumothorax. It's so small that the patient won't have any pulmonary symptoms. It's only detected by imaging, and even then it often has to be cross-sectional imaging (i.e. CT scan).

"Punctured lung" is a great term for the talking heads of the sports world to use when discussing Romo's newfound toughness, but I highly doubt it was of any significant medical concern.

 

[tiedyeddog]

Apparently, it was fully healed this morning. So in five days his punctured long is totally healed!

 

[dyeguy21]

Yeah that's all I was wondering, basically if it was like "OMG HE PUNCTURED a LUNG! and playedddd" or if it was a tiny little poke that might have been a tiny hole and caused everyone to over-react. Especially when they said earlier in the week that they were trying to get him to play this week.

I was like so he has a punctured lung and the team doctors are going to let him play, let alone move....sounded fishy. He has guts for going back in with broken ribs, because I can't imagine what it hurt like to get hit again on the next play, but lets not make him a man that can survive without air.

It also happened with Vick this week, where they went "VICK is spitting up BLOOD!" after his hit (the second I heard this I yelled at the TV saying he bit his tongue) sure enough 10 mins later during a play they coyly mentioned that...he bit his tongue. However, all post-game analysis and sportscenter commentary somehow tried to make it seem like he just had massive internal hemorrhage from a head bump.

 

[dyeguy21]

Apparently, it was fully healed this morning. So in five days his punctured long is totally healed!

Hey those K-balls are slippery...🙄