Hurts Is Cleared For Play
One reason I love sports is that every year you feel guaranteed to see stupid shit you’ve never seen before. You’d think it would be difficult. The game is the same basic game. The league has the same basic problems. And yet, without fail, something stupid will happen that you’ve never seen before. I can’t say I remember ever seeing a team mismanage a dude with blood clots like this.
I write this Tuesday afternoon, and as of right now the details to this story are quite muddled, so it is hard to pin anything down. When did the doctors notice his blood clot? Who cleared him to play? How involved was the team in that decision? Was he forced to stay awake out of risk to his health and play a football game tired? Is Nick Sirianni being thrown under a bus? Would anyone be particularly sad if he was?
What we seem to know for sure was that Hurts was diagnosed with a superficial blood clot. Superficial sounds mild, and it is milder than deep vein thrombosis, but in medical terms it just means the clot is close to the surface of the skin. It is still a clot. He was cleared to play in the game. At some point the clot moved to his lungs and became serious, and now he’s going to miss the rest of the season to rehab on blood thinners.
It is hard to tell exactly what went wrong and why, but it certainly feels like something went wrong. Hurts experienced issues with the clot prior to flying to London, but the clot was not diagnosed until London. If you aren’t aware, flying with a blood clot is pretty dangerous as the lack of movement make the clot more likely to move. You don’t want the clots to move because it could enter the brain or heart or lungs and we are reaching stroke/death territory.
Yahoo has a pretty good timeline laid out if you need it. Hurts appears to have been awake in the hospital until 4am as part of the diagnosis process but he wasn’t completely without rest and he was deemed safe to play as movement is not bad for a superficial clot. I’m not a doctor and I can’t say for sure if he should have played in a brutal contact sport with a clot. It seems like the worst handling of things went down after the game when he was sent home.
Shortly after the news broke of how serious a situation Hurts was now in, Sirianni was sent alone into a press conference with seemingly no preparation to answer questions. The NFL also “investigated”, and found no wrongdoing, and even if that is true it’ll be a cold day in hell when I believe the NFL on something like this at face value. Hopefully a reporter digs deep enough and gives us the full story at some point.
Is that supposed to be a UK doctor wearing the ceremonial bearskin helmet worn by the King’s Guard? Because in my 66 years, I’ve never seen anyone in the NHS wear one of those. Maybe he’s a Harley Street specialist, but I very much doubt it. You’ve drawn some weird shit over the years Dave, but this is right up there on the Weird-O-Meter.
As an American I immediately saw it and said, “Must be the London hospital”. Great art tells the stories in more than words. I bet that hat has room for two squirrels to screw in it.
The joke, which don’t worry, Dave, I get, is that it’s the same doctor as in almost every comic we’ve seen with a doctor in it, but wearing the bearskin hat because London.
Now I want to see nurse Joy assisting red head doc as a background gag in a future comic.
I mean, American doctors don’t wear cowboy hats, but I would bet that putting a doctor in a cowboy hat in a comic printed in the UK would be an effective way to signal that the doctor and/or the setting is American. Silly and weird too, yes, but effective for sure. Dave is generally an effective cartoonist.
It’s a joke, possibly tongue in cheek but all in good fun and to emphasize where someone is from. He’s also done comics where Chicagoans are constantly holding deep dish pizza
That’s just how people from London look. It’s like how all French people have that same shirt with the horizontal stripes.
As much as I can’t stand Sirianni or his rambling, inchorent press conferences, the Eagles did him no favors whatsoever. Howie or at least one of the medical staff should have been there with him. Instead, they kind of threw him to the wolves, and then he tried to avoid the questions initially, but there was no way that wasn’t going to end up as a disaster.
I can’t wait to see Arch Manning take the field at Jalen Hurt$ Stadium next year. Most of the coaching staff deserves to be / will be fired, Saquon and Smith will get traded for some draft picks (when Philly is allowed to draft again in 2037, when the last lawsuit is settled), and this team won’t approach an above .500 season again until my kids are finding a mediocre retirement community for me to rot in. You wanted the dark times to come back to Philly for the next 20 years? You got ’em, baby! Wheeeeee-yoooo!
(Go Sixers.)
I personaly don’t like the eagles, or their fans. But man, they are having the season from hell. Thoughts and prayers for jalen hurts.
Love the hat on the doctor!
This is one of those things we won’t know the true details for a while, if at all. Specifics are locked in medical records in two countries so you’d have to go with recollections of the people involved and what they are willing to say. The NFLPA is pushing for an investigation and even if they get an independent one it’ll still be off what Hurts remembers of his conversations with the doctors and team medical staff and what he’s willing to share. Same with the team medical staff.
Really hope that this doesn’t end Hurts’ career.
Because you know if he never plays another down after this, questions are always going to be asked.
I’m just holding out hope that Pablo finds out (again)
“You have no authority here, Doctor Largedom! None whatsoever!”
“Did he just kick him from the room?”
The timeline has been cleared up a bit. Hurts was never told not to sleep, but he did go with minimal sleep for about 36 hours, including at the hospital, and then a reporter turned that into “he was told not to sleep for medical reasons and went without sleep for 36 hours.” The timeline appears to be: Hurts was hit in the calf by a cleat during Week 4’s game. Then he flew to London, and his calf was extremely painful on the flight, so he went to the hospital once he landed. At the hospital, he was diagnosed with a superficial blood clot, then was released (or got back to the team hotel) at 3 AM on game day. Hurts slept at the hotel, then at the stadium to rest for the game, then played. Then Hurts flew back to the US. Once in the US, it was discovered that the blood clot had moved, benching him for Week 6. Subsequent testing showed Hurts also had DVT and clots in both lungs, and he is now out for the season.
I don’t fault the team for flying him to and from London because he flew before he knew he had a clotting issue, and flying was the best way to bring him back even when they knew it would be riskier. I do wonder why the Eagles chose to play a guy who had just gotten out of the hospital. Even if doctors tell patients with SVT to keep moving and exercising, Hurts probably should have been put on a plane back to the US once he got out of the hospital, not after the game. That’s where the issue lies. Yes, Hurts is a professional athlete and wanted to play, but this is a situation where he should have been benched for his own good. The man was in enough pain to be sent to a hospital while overseas; he shouldn’t have been playing, even if he could work out with the team.