This may be a reason why not to do single leg lifts.
The accident
Artie Woods had just one more lift.
Everything that Friday morning had gone according to schedule. Waking early. Conditioning at the stadium. Lifting in the weight room.
What many considered a drag was a blast for Artie. While he played last fall as a true freshman, even had a few catches, everything was tough. A running back in high school, he had to learn his new position, the technique, the blocking, even the routes.
It finally started to click last spring. Artie snagged four catches for 111 yards and two touchdowns as the star of the spring game.
He’d been thinking about the 2007 season for months.
"Undefeated. Big 12 championship, of course,” Artie said, clicking off his goals. "There was just a lot of stuff.”
He paused.
"Deep balls. Just thinking about pretty much a thousand yards.”
He chuckled.
"That sort of stuff.”
As summer rolled and practice neared, he sensed the excitement, the hope, the change.
"I felt a lot different,” he said. "I was right there where I wanted to be.”
That Friday morning, he did bench press, squats, incline, just about everything. As he finished doing step-up lifts, a drill designed to build leg strength, Artie moved to re-rack the weights. With 185 pounds resting on his shoulders, his ankle rolled.
Artie went down.
He landed on his rear end, his torso pressed forward. He essentially folded in half.
Teammates and strength coaches rushed to his aid.
"At first, it wasn’t hurtin’ that bad,” Artie said, "but then, they tried to move me.”
He heard himself scream, begging for something to stop the pain.
"I was thinking it was a dream,” he said. "Ain’t no way this just happened. Just liftin’ weights, everything goin’ good. I had my weekend planned out and everything.
"I was almost to my weekend until that happened.”
It changed everything.
The surgery
What Artie could feel as the paramedics worked and the ambulance rolled scared him.
What he couldn’t feel did, too.
"I was probably more afraid than anything because I couldn’t feel my legs,” he said. "It wasn’t even like a numb feeling. It was like a completely gone feeling.”
But then, there was the sharp pain in his back along his spine.
"It felt like it was stickin’ out my back,” he said. "It felt like everything back there was just broke.”
Emergency room doctors at Stillwater Medical Center determined Artie had fractured vertebrae and an impaired neurological response.
Mark Pascale, OSU’s team orthopedic surgeon, was out of town at a conference, so he called Brock Schnebel, OU’s team doctor and a spine specialist. After looking at the tests and talking to the docs, Schnebel knew the injury was serious.
It occurred at the lowest point of Artie’s spinal cord, called the conus medullarus. There, the spinal cord is not a solid column but rather thin fingers of nerves.
Artie suffered a fracture dislocation, meaning he had broken vertebrae and dislocated his spine.
"If you could draw it as a spectrum,” Schnebel said, "ligaments tear, then joints locate, then bones fail, then the spinal cord gets hurt. He wasn’t completely paralyzed, but he was neurologically impaired.”
The doctors in Stillwater started prepping Artie for surgery, giving him a high dose of steroids to reduce swelling and limit damage. Less than three hours after the accident, Artie was transferred to Mercy Health Center in Oklahoma City.
Schnebel thought he might have to fuse as many as four or five of Artie’s vertebrae. Even a two-level fusion would have meant the end of his football career. Playing contact sports with a multi-level fusion is ill-advised.
Ultimately, Schnebel only needed to fuse one level.
“Knowing that he wanted to be an athlete and keep playing … we tried to preserve levels,” Schnebel said. “If the same injury happened to a non-athlete, though, I’d do the same thing.”
After nearly three hours of surgery, Schnebel felt optimistic about Artie’s chances.
“There’s the ligament part of the injury, there’s the boney part of the injury, and then, there’s the spinal cord part of the injury,” Schnebel said. “The least predictable injury for us is the spinal cord. We can’t tell how much function’s going to come back, how much it will recover.
“We did everything we could.”
Those hours after the surgery were a haze for Artie, and yet he remembers exactly how he felt.
“I wasn’t mad or nothin’,” he said. “I was just real happy for some reason.
“I was happy to be alive or somethin’.”
The rehab
Artie’s first step on the road to recovery was a wiggle.
The morning after surgery, Schnebel asked Artie to do one small thing.
“See if you can wiggle your toes,” the doctor said.
The patient could.
Artie spent much of the next few days lying on his back. He got out of bed a few times but needed help just to stand.
Three days after the accident, he moved to McBride Clinic Orthopedic Hospital to begin intense rehabilitation. The therapists had a simple goal; they wanted Artie to be able to care for himself when he returned to Stillwater.
They motivated him, though, with football.
“You had to be cognizant of the fact that he was an athlete and wanted to push,” the woman who oversaw his physical therapy said. “You had to structure it so that he felt like he was pushing and doing everything he could but not put him in harm’s way.”
Michelle Wald understood the balance between the two as well as anyone could. A former softball player at OU, she knew what it was to be a college athlete, the work, the desire, the passion.
But she also knew how vulnerable Artie was.
Whether he was walking with his walker or standing in place to build endurance, Wald supported him much of the time and stayed close by all the time. They always worked close to the mats, too.
“He didn’t know if his legs were going to hold him up,” Wald said.
Sometimes, they didn’t.
But even when Artie wilted, he always kept going. He approached therapy the way he did practice.
One of the trainers even brought Artie’s practice jersey to McBride. When it was time for therapy, Artie put on his jersey. He only took it off when he was done for the day.
“It just made me feel better,” Artie said, “kind of motivated.”
Wald also structured Artie’s therapy like his teammates’ workout. One day, the guys were doing a dozen 200-yard dashes. Artie did his own version of the workout, doing a stair-step exercise a dozen times.
“We normally go faster,” he told Wald.
“We can’t go faster,” she said. “We need to go longer.”
Slowly but surely, Artie regained his strength. He could stand again on his right leg, the one most affected by the injury.
Artie had his bad days, and he fessed up to them. Those were the times, after all, that he found himself questioning his football future. He’d worked so hard, dreamed so big, and it might all be gone. But when it came time for therapy, he forged ahead.
Ten days after the accident, Artie walked without assistance.
“A lot of times, you get stuck in denial,” Wald said. “But he realized that it was a blessing that he was recovering, that he was able to do what he was doing.”
And that gained him a fan, even one with a game day garb that’s crimson down to her socks. “I did tell him,” Wald said, “I’m the No. 1 Artrell Woods fan when he gets back to playing.”
The road back
Artie has made it so far. Still, so much remains. When Artie first returned to Stillwater less than two weeks after the accident, he struggled just moving around his apartment. He had to learn how to put on his brace, how to get out of bed, how to get dressed. His stamina was short. “Once we got in the facility to do rehab,” OSU head trainer Rob Hunt said, “there were times he was just cooked. Just going from the parking lot to the athletic training room was difficult.” Ditto for standing for extended periods. Taking a shower was nearly impossible. “I knew if I fell I’d probably be right back where I was,” Artie said. Did he have close calls? “Lots of ‘em.” But he never fell. “I told him there would likely be setbacks along the way,” Hunt said. “He hasn’t had one yet. There was steady progression, even though it may not have been as fast as he wanted.”
Artie still hasn’t been cleared to start running or doing big lifts in the weight room. He will begin running after the first of the year, starting with jogging and working his way up as the doctors deem safe. His broken vertebrae need at least nine months to heal completely, and his weakened right leg remains a work in progress.
“I think his back’s going to heal fine,” Hunt said. “It’s just making sure that leg returns to normal. He may return back-wise, and leg function might not be enough. He won’t be fast enough. He won’t be agile enough. I think he will. But those are the things that will determine whether he plays.”
Schnebel said, “I suspect he’ll have some difference in his performance. I don’t think he’ll ever be the way he was before the injury, but I think he can be close.” Artie isn’t shooting for close.
He wants to be better.
“I don’t want to be out there just to be out there, just another soul on the field,” Artie said. “I want to be out there makin’ a difference.”