ER Doctor REACTS to Worst Football Injuries in NFL History

- [Announcer] Breaks the tackle. - Oh my gosh, look at that ankle! Oh! (beep) Getting your bell rung, gnarly ankle fractures, and what in the heart attack is happening here? In honor of football season kicking off here in the US, today we are reacting to all the possible career-ending medical scenes and jaw dropping injuries from the NFL. - Come on football, go, go! - [Doctor] Let's dive right in. (beep) - [Announcer] This is the play where Tua Tagovailoa was chased down and- - Oh! Ouch, head injury! Once you start having neurologic findings with these type of head injuries, it gets pretty concerning. - [Announcer] The dynamic quarterback was clearly in pain, his fingers clinched. - [Doctor] The hands doing something abnormal. This is a seizure. If you get knocked out, if you get unconscious, and you have a syncopal episode, you can have this motion as well. - [Announcer] Lying there for several minutes before he was taken off the field on a stretcher. - [Doctor] Good, they got him off the field. You do see spine precautions. Typically, you don't necessarily need imaging of somebody who has a concussion. Somebody bumped their head and they have a little bit of a headache. You may not need to. - [Announcer] But many are questioning why he was on the field to begin with. - Interesting. - [Announcer] On Sunday, just four days earlier, against the Buffalo Bills, Tua hit his head on the ground, grabbed his face mask, shook his head, before stumbling to the ground. - Yeah. Concussions. You're getting head trauma. The brain shakes around in your skull, depends on your age, but doesn't necessarily shake and rattle around at a younger age, but as we get a little bit older, the brain starts to shrink a little bit. - [Announcer] The team called it a back injury and he returned to the game. - Yeah, so multiple injuries to the head, especially in football, can cause something called CTE. Typically, once you start having three or more concussions, doctors, sports medicine individuals are kinda like, "You need to either stop doing this activity or figure out how to protect yourself." - [Announcer] You gotta keep it. Prescott breaks the tackle. - Oh my gosh, look at that ankle! Oh! Not anatomically in the right position. Immediately you think fracture or dislocation, obviously, it's not rocket science to figure that component out. You do want to put this back in sooner than later. - [Announcer] Oh, oh no! Oh. - It's caught underneath. Yes. Ouch. Looks like a simple dislocation, right? Just because of the way that it slid right out. But a lot of times dislocations come with fractures when it comes to the ankle. - [Announcer] You almost gotta hope it's a cramp, don't you? If you're a Cowboy fan right there but- - So what ends up happening in that situation, multiple different things occur. If it's just a dislocation, put that back in. If it is fractured with a dislocation, you need to have surgery. We often see a fracture with a dislocation. - [Announcer] Oh, no. Oh, you could just see that at the bottom. Just, oh! - Having the joint out increases the risk of arthritis and long-term problems later. So we put it back in and then we call the orthopedic surgeon. Sometimes you'll have immediate surgery right then and there, or they may wait. It just depends on how the surgeon feels the amount of swelling that's already there. Oh! I remember this! And collapse. Wow! That's Damar Hamlin! And he actually goes into cardiac arrest. ♪ Cardiac arrest ♪ He has something called commotio cordis. Basically, it's when you have, typically, blunt trauma directed at the heart. - [Announcer] Not what any of us wanna see, and now everybody's around him, and let's hope that he's gonna be okay. - If you hit just right, maybe, just wrong, just when you're at the perfect part of your depolarization-repolarization cycle, then it goes into this situation. - [Announcer] Darryl Stingley was a New England Patriots wide receiver from 1973 to 1977. In a 1978 preseason game against the Oakland Raiders on August 12th, Stingley was hit- - Oh, man! Direct linear force probably causing some blowout fractures of the cervical spine. - [Announcer] As Stingley stretched for a pass, he and Tatum collided. Stingley's helmet, made contact with Tatum's shoulder pad compressing his spinal cord and breaking his fourth and fifth cervical vertebrae. - When he describes that it's compressing the spinal cord, meaning the structure of the bones of your neck, because the only way to compress the spinal cord itself is if there's no structure around it. - [Announcer] He eventually regained limited movement in his right arm, but spent the rest of his life as a quadriplegic. The injury came just after Stingley had finished negotiating a contract extension that would've made him one of the highest paid receivers in the NFL. - Wow! Quadriplegic, meaning all four limbs are not working appropriately. If you start going higher than that, you run the risk of not being able to breathe. Just like where Superman, Christopher Reeve, had a high cervical spine injury, thus he needed a tube to help him breathe. Seeing these injuries reminds me of all the injuries I've had and how important it is to get a good night's sleep to repair my body. If you, my friend, are looking for a better night's sleep, check out, Do Not Disturb by my company called Life Happens. On our website, lifehappens.com and on Amazon. - [Rashad] Boom, I hit it, happened. I got up and it happens a lot. You have a shoulder and you're kind of just trying to rub it out, like my hand was just throbbing. - Thinking it's maybe like a nerve or a stinger causing like pain to the hand. Okay, that's normal. - Sure, that's normal. - And I look down and before I know it, my white glove is fire hot red. There's blood everywhere. I come off the field, you know, just thinking like, "Hey, maybe I lost a nail." Maybe, you know, something happened there and before I know it I could feel my heartbeat in my hand. - That's quite common when people say they feel their heartbeat. It's just your normal pulse beating literally due to the dilation of your blood vessels due to increased blood flow. You just feel it more where there's an injury because it's just more intense in that spot. - [Rashad] They've taken the glove off, thrown it in the trash can, and from my nail portion up in my left middle finger, it's completely severed. The blood is spewing off onto the wall. - We deal with this in the emergency department where people lose tips of fingers. You can have it traumatically ripped off. I've even seen people who use those, like, upside down back stretchers. The mechanism where it actually pivots from get their fingers caught and rip their fingers off. - [Rashad] And lo and behold, they pull my glove- - And the finger's there? - [Rashad] Out of the trash can. It just falls right there on the table. - Well, yeah, there you go. Wow! Unfortunately, when it's a very distal end like that, the likelihood, even if you have the piece of re plantation, is very little and minimal, only because the vessels and the attachment areas are very small. Oh, that's an ankle! Ouch! That is definitely anatomically the wrong direction. I don't think that's a sprain. Could be a sprain, but it looks more like a fracture or a dislocation. Hard to know exactly here because you don't see, like, bones sticking out, it's not breaking through the skin or significantly protruding in one way or the other. It's just significantly rotated. - [Announcer] And no doubt that ground caused the fumble there and that ball will stay with the Vikings, but Gordon is injured on the play. - You can snap either the medial malleolus, the lateral malleolus, both. You can have a dislocation needing emergent surgery, pins and rods and screws or plates. Just depends on the type of injury. - [Announcer] Bro hit in the end zone that left him on the ground. Hands visibly shaking. - Head injury leading to almost seizure-like activity. Abnormal movements that you're not controlling is because the brain is getting traumatized and injured. - [Announcer] But he was allowed to return to the game before ultimately being sidelined with a concussion. - I can't believe he is allowed to go back to the game. - I'm ready to go in, coach, just gimme a chance. - Like, putting these people back in the game, like, please don't do this! This is your brain. This is super sensitive. You only got one of 'em. You know, we haven't figured out brain transplants yet. Like, don't put yourself at risk for chronic problems. Football, we know football is a pretty intense sport with a lot of traumatic-type injuries. If you guys enjoyed this and you want me to like react more to sports related injuries, let me know. As always, check out this playlist right here, binge watch everything and please make sure you subscribe, turn your bell notifications on and hit that like button for me. Thank you so much for watching and stay healthy my friends.