Coming back from injury: prehab, patient rehab and the long road back
Joey Diaz credits prehab before knee surgery, Tom Segura calls a serious injury his turning point, Tony Hawk rebuilt after a broken femur, Travis Barker came through thirty surgeries, and Russell Crowe, Josh Brolin, David Blaine and fighter Ethyn Ewing describe their own rehab. Their stories agree that the work before and after the operation decides the result, and that setbacks during recovery are normal.
Coming back from a serious injury is decided less by the day of the operation or accident than by what you do in the weeks before it and the months after. Across eleven conversations, the people who came back describe that same shape, with setbacks running through nearly every account. These are personal accounts, not medical guidance. Decisions about surgery, rehab, drugs and supplements belong with a doctor and a physical therapist.
Joey Diaz says his second knee surgery went far better than his first because he prepared, with pre-surgery strengthening and a supplement regimen from his health advisor. Tom Segura broke his arm and tore his patellar tendon, and his physical therapist told him rehab would leave him in the best shape of his life. It did, though nerve damage made the arm harder than the knee.
Tony Hawk shows both sides. After breaking his femur he rushed back, and by his own account, "I just didn't listen to any of the professional advice". Seven or eight months later X-rays showed the bone had never joined. He healed only after a second operation, two months without movement and work with a doctor of physical therapy. Travis Barker survived a plane crash with 70 percent of his body burned and 30 surgeries. Colin O'Brady, burned over about 25 percent of his body and told he might never walk normally, began with one step to a kitchen chair and won a triathlon eighteen months later.
Others supply cautions. Russell Crowe returned to boxing 21 days after shoulder surgery and has the arthritis his doctor predicted. Bert Sorin kept competing on a leg with a blood clot that could have killed him. David Blaine avoids shoulder surgery and still cannot really work out.
They disagree on rest versus movement. Josh Brolin kept training through worsening sciatica until it vanished, and Joe Rogan says, "Movement is everything," yet Hawk kept moving and drove his bone apart. The article's reading is that these are different injuries, and nothing in the accounts lets a person tell which he has without a diagnosis. They also disagree on surgery, with successes and failures on both sides, and on pain medicine.
On defying doctors a pattern shows. The defiance that worked was against predictions about the long-term ceiling, pursued through patient, graded rehab. The defiance that failed was against instructions about healing time.
There are limits. Prehab applies to planned surgery. These are wealthy people with unusual access, and the treatments they credit, such as peptides, stem cells, hyperbaric oxygen and electrical muscle stimulation, are testimony, not established evidence. Some things do not come back.
What to do with it: if the operation is planned, build strength beforehand and take any supplement or drug question to your doctor. Get the diagnosis before deciding how hard to push. Obey healing time and argue about the ceiling. Make the first goal tiny. Do the physical therapy and treat it as training. Expect a setback and adjust. Choose low-impact work with rest built in, protect sleep and food, and recruit one person who expects you to recover.