The injury that Ryan Shazier’s teammates said he suffered in Monday’s game — a spinal cord concussion — can have a wide range of recovery time depending on the severity of the injury, according to one NFL team physician, who has dealt with similar injuries.
“There have been players who came back within a week,” Robert Flannery, who has worked for two years with the Cleveland Browns and is an assistant professor in the division of sports medicine at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, said Tuesday. “But some have taken a couple of weeks or months.”
Known medically as a “cervical cord neurapraxia,” a spinal cord concussion is “basically a bruising of the spinal cord” that causes pressure in the spinal canal, Dr.