Earlier this week in Denver, Mark Stone underwent his second back surgery in the span of less than nine months. The Golden Knights called the surgery successful and said Stone will be out indefinitely but is expected to make a full recovery.
Questions surrounding his health impact the team both in the short term and the long term yet there aren’t many answers to be had on a complicated situation. To help guide us through the most likely scenarios and outcomes regarding an athlete’s recovery from multiple back surgeries, we turn to our resident doctor, Dr. Caleb Pinegar of Crovetti Orthopaedics & Sports Medicine.
When you hear the term indefinitely in relation to a second back surgery, how does that read to you?
I think they’ve given up on this season and I think they are just looking at next season. I think they are just saying, “hey look, not happening right now.” They do use that term loosely, but with the surgery he had, it can’t be less than three months.
So you don’t think there’s much chance he plays again this regular or postseason?
Long shot.
There was a report from ESPN’s Emily Kaplan that this injury is a different back injury. When it’s described that way, do you think it means they are completely unrelated or just different areas of his back?
Your lumbar spine has five vertebrae. On the first injury, one of them was the symptomatic area. As we’ve discussed, once a person undergoes one surgery they become more susceptible to future issues on other levels. On his first surgery, the microdiscectomy, they probably just fixed that one spot. It sounds like now there’s an issue in a different spot and he likely had a different procedure. While it’s a similar surgery they might call it a different injury because each level affects a different part of the leg. That being said, they are almost certainly related to each other.
How many different back procedures are there that he could have undergone?
There are really not many and they all do the same thing just on different levels of the spine. You can decompress the root on the right, left, or center, which is removing pieces of disc material that is pinching on the nerve to the side or out the back of the space between the vertebra. Otherwise, if it were more serious, he could have had a laminectomy. That’s where you remove a large chunk of bone.
