My son is injured. Now what?
May 2, 2023
It happened to our son—and it didn’t even occur during an exciting play sliding into home or diving for a ball. He was on the mound pitching, turned to his coach, and said his arm hurt too much to continue. We were surprised and confused. We were careful with pitch counts and we did what we could to make sure his arm stayed healthy.
Our first step was to reach out to our amazing network of baseball families for recommendations. They helped us find a local physical therapist who specializes in baseball. The PT felt that our son had a nerve issue and we scheduled weekly sessions. After a few weeks and no real improvement, we decided it was time to see an orthopedist.
In hindsight, we wish we had done that sooner. While we trusted the PT, he had no way of knowing what was going on other than his experience and our son’s symptoms. We again leaned on our network of baseball families to get a reference for an orthopedist.
The orthopedist had our son go for an MRI, which was not a pleasant experience. He had to sit still while they injected contrast dye into his elbow. He hung in like a champ, but as a parent, it’s tough to see your kid go through something like that. When the results came in, we donned our masks and headed back to the orthopedist.
After an hour and a half waiting masked-up in a small room, the doctor came in. Our son had a bone injury that would take time to heal. No hitting or throwing for 8 to 12 weeks. We were relieved he didn’t need surgery, but it was a hard pill to swallow for a kid obsessed with baseball. To make things worse, showcase tryouts were happening over the next few weekends.
Of course, you have to do what’s right for your kid’s health even if it means missing tryouts or sitting out a season. As our PT always reminded us, our son had many years of baseball ahead. Pushing him now could get in the way of that. This is difficult to explain to a young teenager, especially during COVID when so many other things had already been taken away. It helped that our son heard it straight from the doctor and got to ask questions.
In addition to rest and PT, the orthopedist suggested platelet-rich plasma (PRP) therapy to speed the recovery. PRP is not covered by insurance and it isn’t cheap. It also sounded uncomfortable. They draw blood, spin it through a machine, and then reinject it at the site of the injury.
Our first instinct was to trust the doctor and do everything we could to help our son. We’re fortunate we could manage the expense, which might have put the treatment out of reach for other families. But we held back so we could do some research and asked around.
We saw that PRP was growing in popularity among professional athletes. We also found plenty of online articles touting its benefits. However, these articles were typically posted by facilities that offered this service. And although we think our son is a fantastic baseball player, he’s not playing for the Yankees.
We searched for scientific studies but couldn’t find any that showed PRP was effective for this kind of injury. Additionally, we posted to this group and got some useful information. All of this helped us make our final decision, which was to pass on the procedure.
What about tryouts? We were lucky enough that our son could try out for a team who knew him and what he could do on the mound. He sucked it up and tried out without hitting or throwing. Thankfully, he made one of their teams. Now we could breathe a sigh of relief, buckle in for the remaining time off, and get excited for the season (whatever that might look like during a pandemic).
Here’s what we learned.
- We hope our experience can help other families who have young players dealing with an injury.
- Listen to your kid when they say something is wrong. We’ll be the first to admit, our son can milk an injury. But we’re really glad his coach immediately took him out of that game before he could do more damage to his arm.
- Lean on your baseball community for support. Someone else has probably gone through something similar and can provide referrals and advice base on their experience.
- Post in baseball groups, like this one. We got a lot of great answers to our questions from our virtual baseball networks.
- Get a proper diagnosis. Looking back, we wish we had gone to the orthopedist earlier. We hoped it was a minor thing that PT could correct, but it was better to know exactly what we were dealing with.
- Do your research. It would have been easy to jump at the PRP treatment. By doing some digging, we were able to make an informed and confident decision.
- Do smart research. There’s a ton of information online and not all of it is helpful. Make sure you’re looking at credible websites and search for scientific studies you can trust.
- Involve your kid in the process. We encouraged our son to ask the PT and orthopedist questions. We also gave him all the information we had. He was still frustrated, but he understood why he had to sit out and do all of those boring PT exercises.