WATCH THE VIDEO HERE!
Delaying medical attention for a hip injury by one Ponca High Schooler caused him to miss an entire track season, highlighting the importance of prompt treatment. The bad luck of injuries changed his mindset, he is now going to school for sports medicine hoping to help people like the folks at CNOS who helped him. Football, wrestling, and track are just a few of the sports that led to a skeleton of issues Brady Carnell of Ponca, Nebraska spent almost every school year with a new injury.
“In second grade, I was in a wrestling match, and I broke my left arm pretty bad, dislocated both bones in it, and that kind of just started the downhill spiral from there,” said Carnell going over the skeleton his mom made him for graduation to showcase all of the casts he has collected over the years. Collecting casts like coins.
“And then, in fourth grade, I broke my other arm. So this list keeps going,” said Carnell. Each cast represented a different sports-related injury, but there was one injury that happened his junior year he let go too long resulting in surgery to take care of the issue. “Junior year, I had my hip surgery on my left hip because of a torn labrum,” said Carnell. He went to CNOS to see Dr. Bissell.
Carnell explained what happened, “I took a wrong step, and I felt like a little pull, I guess you could say. And for the longest time, I thought it was just a pulled muscle. After the season I tried to get in shape for track, and I noticed that it still hurt to run. So after another month or so, I’d say, I finally got it checked out, and it ended up being more than what I thought it would be.” He continued, “I could have gone as soon as football ended, rather than waiting a month or two, and that month or two ended up making ended up making me miss the whole track season, and we had been state qualifiers in the four by eight the year before, so I felt like I was letting my team down.”
“I did do his surgery, which is removing the extra bone and repairing the labrum, and he went through physical therapy and rehab and worked very hard, and he was able to get back to full sports,” said Dr. Benjamin Bissell. Femoroacetabular Impingement also known as Hip FAI is a common cause of hip pain. It occurs when the bones of the hip joint are not shaped properly, causing them to rub against one another. “It happens to us when we grow between the ages of 10 and 16, our hips grow a little bit differently, and they grow some extra bone by the ball, and that can lead to impingement or the when you flex your hip up, the bones can rub into each other. They won’t rotate like they’re supposed to,” said Dr. Bissell.
Carnell has some words of advice for people who are sitting on a lingering pain, “Do it way sooner rather than later.” Now Carnell is a freshman at Wayne State College studying sports medicine. He has fully recovered from his injuries which has inspired him to dive into the medical world. “I’m just wanting to help people that are like me and have had a multitude of injuries, I want to help them be able to recover. I’ve had great doctors and great physical therapists along the way, so that just really sparked my interest,” explained Carnell.
Carnell was happy with the work of Dr. Bissell with CNOS, “He did a fantastic job, I guess you could say because I got back to doing everything I wanted to do. I got back to playing football and running track the next year, and I had no problems with it at all.”