KANSAS CITY, Mo. — A Center High Football player is recovering from a broken vertebrae in his neck. He managed to walk off the field, but now his family is asking questions about how the injury was handled.
Center High was taking on William Chrisman High in a jamboree featuring multiple schools August 17th when 16-year-old Lorenzo Hughes went to make a tackle.
He said as soon as his neck crunched, he felt tingling in his extremities. Trainers told his family he’d suffered what they call a “stinger.”
“She’s like, ‘ice and heat,’ so we followed her directions, trusting that she was the trainer on this team, a medically trained person,” said Lorenzo’s mother, Amber Hughes.
But when he was still in so much pain four days later that he couldn’t open a door, Hughes said he asked his Coach to sit out.
“He knew his body, but he felt like maybe he was over-exaggerating because others were stating that, ‘You are not really hurt. Shake it off,'” she said.
They finally went to get x-rays, and doctors found he had a closed fracture of his sixth cervical vertebrae.
“The doctor said, ‘Children’s Mercy on Gillham Road is waiting for you. He’s having surgery tonight. This is serious,'” Hughes said.
Doctors took bone from his hip and fused it to his neck with a titanium plate and three screws.
Attorney Henry C. Service is concerned with the way he believes coaches and trainers treated the teen’s injury.
“This is a child, a child with a literal broken neck, and he’s asking all the people charged with taking care of him for help and he’s told, ‘Go f*** yourself,'” Service said.
Hughes hopes players, parents and coaches all take a lesson from this to take injuries more seriously.
“He could have died from this injury. He could have been paralyzed,” she said after consulting with doctors.
Center School District released the following statement:
“We are thinking about our student and his family and hopeful for a healthy recovery. While we can’t say anything specific about the incident, we can tell you we consider all student injuries serious. When presented, we address them and investigate them to the fullest. We can share that Center School District provides an on-site licensed athletic trainer for every football practice and scheduled game. We are looking at the situation and want to know what happened. Meanwhile, we are offering to provide as many resources as we can.”
