Lions vs Falcons Ends After Player Has Seizure and Leaves in an Ambulance – Doctor Explains

Lions vs Falcons Ends After Player Has Seizure and Leaves in an Ambulance – Doctor Explains

Tonight’s preseason opener between the Lions and the Falcons and in a way I don’t think we’ve ever seen before on the field after Lions quarterback Maurice Norris was taken off the field in an ambulance after a serious injury on this tackle. Welcome back everybody. I’m Dr. Brian Sudter and the goal on this channel is to teach you more about the medical side of the sports world. So, we unfortunately saw a very scary scene earlier tonight with the Lions and the Falcons. Essentially, what I want you to keep an eye on here is Lions quarterback Maurice Norris located right here. And as he goes in to try to make this tackle, we’re going to see his head get snapped very aggressively backwards into a hyper extended position. Now, in hindsight, of course, we can always be critical of tackling technique, right? This is why we try to teach heads up tackling because when you lower your head into this position, that’s like what’s considered a spear tackle. And this is a very high-risk position for not only sustaining a concussion, but more importantly, sustaining a neck or cervical spine injury. It’s hard to fault, guys, though. This is something that is just kind of instinctual at a young age to lower your head, to try and tense up when you’re going in to make a tackle. But what that does is it removes the natural curvature of your cervical spine that sort of acts like a little bit of a cushion. Think of a bendy straw. If there’s a little bend, you squeeze it on either end, it can flex a little bit, but when you remove that curve in the spine by lowering your chin into a little bit of flexion, you straighten the cervical spine, you lose its ability to maintain some of that axial load. And so as this play continues, we then see that load come in to the top of his head. We see that violent forced hyperextension and then unfortunately we saw him displaying seizure activity on the field shortly after. So now keep an eye here. He’s down on the ground. We can see those legs shaking. That’s very clear seizure activity after a brain or a head injury. Now of course we saw ambulance came out uh very quickly. Right away the medical staff had the stretcher out here. There was no delay in getting the stretcher out here, getting him safely immobilized, and on his way to the hospital. I also want to update, we’ve gotten a nice uh postgame update from Dan Campbell. He’s breathing. He’s moving some of his extremities. He’s talking. So, everything sounds like we’ve avoided the worstc case scenario on initial evaluation. What I want to do in this video is explain why we see that shaking, why they had him on the backboard, why all this happens, and and what we were observing on the field. But what we saw with Donald Parham a couple of years ago with the Chargers right where he got hit. There was even some controversial commentary about how it looked like he was shivering. But in his case, we saw his arms shaking as he was being wheeled off of the field on a stretcher. What we’re seeing here is a postimpact seizure. This is seizure activity. This is increased electrical discharges in the brain as a result of the brain injury. Whenever you have a brain injury, a concussion, there’s this big huge surge of depolarization and activation throughout the neurons in the brain and sometimes that can set off this seizure activity where the neurons are just firing uncontrolled and sending signals down to the muscles telling them to fire. This is what causes part of that fencing response that we see. It’s this post impact discharge of firing in the brain that causes this rigid posturing. And sometimes as part of that rigid posturing, we’ll then see these sort of tonicclonic jerks in the seizure activity like we were observing here with Norris. So when you see this after a clear impact to the head, yes, it’s concerning to look at, but this is just an external manifestation of what has happened in the brain from that traumatic impact, from that traumatic brain injury. I want to commend something right away here that many of you probably did not notice. pay attention to the first medical staff members to run out here onto the field. It’s the Falcons. And this is a really important point that again, absolute applause to the medical staff here. Whenever you’re covering a game, there is this mutual agreement that if a player goes down in your vicinity, it doesn’t matter if it’s your player or not, you are there for everybody. And so, if you are closest, you are running out there all hands on deck to tend to your player. Even though this is a Lions player, the first person running out there to tend to him is a staff member for the Falcons. Don’t know who this is, but absolute props here that we see them respond so urgently to get out there even though it’s not their player. As he’s down on the field here, you can again see this looks to be primarily Falcon staff members. I think this was the Falcon sideline up here and so they’re a little bit closer where they see it easier. We see some of the Falcons uh or the Lions staff members come out. You’ll notice here that this staff member is making this X symbol with his hands. This is a sign that we need to get the card out, that this is serious. This is all hands on deck. Right away in this situation, when you get out there, if I’m covering, if I went out there on the field, they haven’t had time to do an assessment for nerve function in his arms or his legs. But when you see this seizure activity, you assume that it’s going to be a more significant injury. And you have to assume when somebody is unconscious and not able to respond that you’re dealing with a cervical spine, a neck injury. And so what they’re doing here is activating the emergency response to immobilize his spine, protect his cervical spine because yes, you’re worried about a brain injury, but you also don’t want to move the neck in a way that’s going to worsen a potential spine injury. And when you’re unconscious like this after being knocked out from that head injury, you can’t accurately respond to questions. you can’t articulate a good response to rule out a neck spine injury and so you assume the worst you get them on the backboard and you get them off to the hospital. Other things you’re going to do in this situation, part of why we see the ambulance on the field. Sometimes that’s just protocol because it’s easier for the ambulance to drive out there than try and wheel them off in a card, etc. But also when you have either a severe brain injury or a cervical spine injury, you can affect the cardio and respiratory centers of the spine that are modulating your heart rate and that are affecting your breathing to the point where you might stop breathing and you might go into cardiac arrest. So you’re getting everything out there. You’re getting all hands on deck, all your resources on the field because again, even though it might be overreaction in hindsight, you’re assuming the worst, you’re getting everything out there. We’re removing the face mask because we want to have access to the airway in case somebody stops breathing. You’re going to apply the oxygen just depending on the exact cardiac or or triage pathways that you’re going through. And so you get everything out there because if that athlete stops breathing or their heart stops, you want to have everything available as quickly as possible to intervene to potentially save their life if necessary. So some of it looks excessive, right? In hindsight, they didn’t need the ambulance most likely, but we always are going to have whatever resources are available in these situations to be ready to act if the worst happens. Remember, we’re also fresh off of Demar Hamlin, even though we didn’t really observe any impact to the chest. You’re always going to be wondering if something like that could develop with subsequent cardiac arrest. So, rewinding this whole play again, we can see as Norris goes in to make this tackle, he unfortunately kind of lowers his head into this position, leads with the helmet. Yeah, you’re not going to fault him in hindsight, but this is what we’re trying to teach out of the sport. What’s going to occur then? He’s going to get this initial impact to the brain that’s going to cause traumatic brain injury. Concussion causes him to lose consciousness, potential for a cervical spine injury because of that axial force going into the top of the head. And then that forced hyperextension. We see him go down to the ground as a outward manifestation of the brain injury. We observe postimpact seizure activity similar to what we can see with the fencing response. medical team activates the emergency response by denoting the X with their arms. Make sure you’re ready to stabilize airway. Make sure you’re ready to get out there in case something happens with the heart. Put them on the backboard because you can’t rule out a cervical spine injury until they have regained more consciousness. Again, very good to see the updates from Dan Campbell after the game that he seems to be alert, moving extremities doing okay. There could always be some lowerle spine injury that we just haven’t evaluated or seen yet. So, you can’t assume that everything is completely out of the woods, so to speak. But great job by the medical staffs here. Excellent to see this so early in the season. Remember, these teams are going through medical reps the same way that the players are in a sense. They’re practicing all this pregame. But this is the first time this exact crew has had to do something like this in a game, and so it’s good to see them perform so well, so quickly in a high stakes situation. That’s it for the video, everybody. Thank you as always for watching. Let me know any questions or comments down below. And until next time, we’ll see you later. by

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Lions cornerback Morice Norris Jr had to be taken off the field in an ambulance after suffering a serious injury in the NFL preseason game vs the Atlanta Falcons

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