LeGrand's full recovery remains uncertain

The condition of Rutgers defensive end Eric LeGrand, who is temporarily paralyzed after sustaining a spinal cord injury in Saturday's football game, is still unknown.

LeGrand underwent emergency surgery at Hackensack University Medical Center the night after suffering the injury during the fourth quarter against Army. His family and friends issued a statement thanking the University community for its support.

"We want to say thank you to everyone for all of your prayers, kind words and well wishes," they said in the statement. "We appreciate every single thought. Eric is in good spirits and we are praying for a full recovery."

The University's head football coach Greg Schiano said he and his team are confident the School of Arts and Sciences junior will recover from the injury, but he is still asking the University community for help.

"We ask our fans and the entire Rutgers community to believe and pray for Eric as he begins the recovery process," he said in a statement.

Joe Lefeged, the captain and starting safety for the Knights, dealt with many emotions after seeing the hit LeGrand endured, but he said the only way to play football is to play as hard as one can.

"If we give anything less, we would get hurt.  So we have to play the game like Eric would play," said Lefeged, a School of Arts and Sciences senior. "If we all play like he did and came with the passion to practice like he did every day, we'd be a much better football team."

Timothy Hosea, an associate clinical professor of orthopedics at Robert Wood Johnson University Medical School, explained the spinal cord is the nervous system that runs from a person's head to the tailbone.

"It provides all the impulses that move all your extremities and the function of a lot of your internal organs," he said. "If you have any injury to the spinal cord where it is severed or significantly bruised, then you lose function."

After suffering a spinal cord injury, the worst-case scenario is that the injured person could either qualify as a paraplegic or a quadriplegic.

"A paraplegic is someone who has lost function somewhere below their neck, which means their upper extremities work. Quadriplegic means someone does not have function of all four extremities," he said. "Quadriplegic means damage happened to the cervical spine, which is the upper part of your spine."

The first step in working with a spinal cord injury is to stabilize the spinal cord, which helps in preventing any further injury.

"That's what they did on [LeGrand] Saturday night," he said. "Now it is basically a waiting game to see what happens and whether the spinal cord may heal."

LeGrand is currently temporarily paralyzed and Hosea said it might take awhile to see if the University student's spinal cord will recover.

"I would talk more towards a month. If you have a window of months, the chance of [the injury] healing after that period of time is very remote," he said. "But he is very early on, so to anticipate or expect anything going out right now is just not going to happen. It just isn't appropriate."

The area of the spinal cord that is damaged is significant when figuring out whether the person will be paralyzed since each injury is different, Hosea said.

"For your cervical spine area, it depends on what type of injury it is. The lower down on your cervical spine the injury occurs, the more function you can have with your arms," he said. "But as you get higher up, you lose less function of your upper extremities."

Although the outlook for LeGrand's recovery is somewhat opaque at this time, Hosea referenced two football players who endured similar injuries and fully recovered.

A hit put on Penn State cornerback Adam Taliaferro in 2000 caused damage to the C5 part of his spinal cord.  Buffalo Bills tight end Kevin Everett took a devastating hit in 2007 during a special teams play, causing damage to the C3 and C4 parts of his spinal cord.

Although the expectation for each player to walk again was grim, they both recovered from their injuries. In addition, Everett's spinal cord injury was in the same area of LeGrand's injury.

"But [the injuries] are all different," Hosea said. "So it's impossible to predict who will do well and may not do so well."

School of Arts and Sciences senior Eric Schultz said he attended Saturday's game and did not know what to think after seeing the hit LeGrand took.

"It took a long time to get him off. It's just one of those scary things," he said. "All I kept thinking about was not being able to feel anything below my neck, and it's just a scary feeling."