I’m a bit late to the party, please forgive me.
I am a doctor.
I’ve never seen a green stick fracture in an adult in 7 years of working in A+E. I see them every week in children.
They are not impossible, but as this medical journal article from 1996 shows, they are so shockingly rare it’s worth excitedly writing to other doctors to tell them you’ve made a new discovery.
https://goo.gl/gSR4A4
Adult’s bones are literally made of different stuff to children’s bones - meaning that a green stick fracture is almost impossible.
What is unusual about Coutts’ fracture is that despite that horrible photo, he has only broken the tibia, and not it’s little brother, the fibula. Coupled with the fact that he doesn’t require surgery, this means the fracture (greenstick or no greenstick) must be a relatively minor one.
In a professional athlete, even the slightest misalignment of the bones would probably result in surgery. (Another reason to think it’s not greenstick - these often deform the bone with some ‘angulation’ (bending) - which in children resolves by itself because the bones are springy, but in adults would require surgery to straighten it up).
However, even a very minor tibial fracture will take a while to heal.
It may only be a few weeks before he is up and about walking around again, but the real problem will be getting him back to full fitness.
Lying in bed all day with your leg in a cast is bad for you. You can lose up to 5% muscle mass per day in the muscles that you aren’t using.
When his leg comes out of that cast in a few weeks time, the bone will likely have rejoined, (the process of rejoining will take 6 weeks, but with some fancy braces you can walk on it again sooner than that) - but the leg will be a shrivelled remnant of it’s former self due to all the muscle wastage.
Like this:
View attachment 33617
It will take another 1-2 months to build up the muscle before he can even start thinking about getting back to something like ‘normal’ training. And then probably another 1-2 months to be back to full fitness after that.
So, even for a minor break, in an absolute best case scenario, with a professional medical team it’s going to be 12-16 weeks.
In reality, probably longer.
If you want to read more about tibial fractures (with gory pictures), this isn’t a bad place to start:
https://emedicine.medscape.com/article/1249984-treatment#d10
Regards,
Your Blades Medical Correspondant
