As an athletic therapist for Collegiate Sports Medicine in Olds, Rebecca Spiers has seen her fair share of ugly sports injuries with many different teams.But the nastiest she's attended to while working on the sidelines had to be a broken femur about seven years ago.“It was in rugby. The player looked like he had an extra knee because the thigh was bent essentially like a knee would be bent,” Spiers said. “But his knee was also bent.”At that point, Spiers' training kicked in as she worked to stabilize the 18-year-old player, who was playing his first game with the club, while waiting for the ambulance to arrive. With a major fracture like this one, he could cause more bone and soft tissue damage if he were allowed to move his leg, she said.Every once in a while, sports fans get to watch athletes hurt themselves in gruesome fashion. On Aug. 1, viewers saw Paul George's leg broken sideways at a right angle, when the Indiana Pacers small forward attempted to block a layup and landed on the net stanchion during a Team USA intra-squad basketball game in Las Vegas.During incidents like these, it's the team's medical staff that has to watch – and treat the injury.Spiers has 19 years of experience working with sports teams. Her first job after graduation was with the Olds Grizzlys 11 years ago. She's also worked with the Olds junior B Tier III Stingers lacrosse team, Rugby Canada, Team Canada's national in-line hockey team, football, and minor and college hockey.When she's behind the bench or on the sidelines, Spiers takes a different perspective and as a result, she does not experience the same squeamish reaction a fan would have when an athlete goes down.“Because I'm looking for it, I'm expecting it so it's not as big of a shock to see some of the bad things,” she said. “A lot of the sports that I have worked in the past are collision type sports: hockey, rugby, football, that sort of stuff. So you tend to see the worst injuries in those anyway.”When working a game, Spiers adds that she only sees the injury once instead of on repeated slow-motion replay and in some cases, not at all – just the aftermath.At SPEERS Health Clinics, which treats patients who've been in everything from car accidents to workplace injuries, physiotherapist Lauren Horst said her focus is on helping the individual, not the visceral response.“I guess most of us get into this kind of profession because we are trying to help people so you just have to think, this person is dealing with this thing so I have to deal with it too,” Horst said about treating a child who needed a skin graft.“You just have to be strong for the patient. They're looking to you for guidance so you have to be the one to be strong and know what direction to take them and stuff.”According to Spiers, that rugby player she treated nearly a decade ago had surgery and eventually returned to the sport.She admitted it was tough to watch athletes get hurt during the start of her career. But as with anything that's difficult, repetition has made the sight routine over time.“The more injuries that you see and the more bad injuries that you see, the easier it gets, I guess.”[email protected]
