NorrisB
Footballguy
Chiefs Johnson confirms he had a cracked bone in his foot
By RANDY COVITZ
The Kansas City Star
PHOENIX _ Chiefs running back Larry Johnson tried clearing up the mystery of the cracked bone in his right foot that caused him to miss the last eight games of the 2007 season.
“I can’t even tell you the medical term,” Johnson said on Wednesday while attending Super Bowl activities. “The bone in my fourth toe by the joint had a slight crack in it, and it shifted a little bit.”
But why all the secrecy? Johnson never disclosed the nature of the injury on the record, and the Chiefs even cited HIPAA privacy laws, something the NFL does not do when it comes to on-field injuries.
“No one knew what I had,” Johnson said. “You can’t diagnose something and not know what it is. My foot was so swollen, no one knew what was going on. They thought it was a Lisfranc, they thought it was my heel, they thought it was my ankle.
“Until you get the CT scans and really rotate my foot with high technology … it’s very, very small, but you’re not going to be able to see it. It looked worse than it was, but at the end of the day, we didn’t know what was wrong.”
The Chiefs elected not to place Johnson on injured reserve until the last week of the season, holding out hope he could play.
“Any time you get a cracked bone or a bone is misplaced, it just takes a while for it to heal,” said Johnson, who said he’s 100 percent now.
“Of course you can run on it, but you’re going to feel an extreme amount of pain if you don’t let it rest for a long amount of time. When I kept trying to come back, I was pushing it too hard where I was always going to have pain.
I think letting it rest a little bit is going to get back to 100 percent like it is.”
Johnson was attending Super Bowl activities promoting a Campbell’s Chunky soup campaign which is donating one million cans to food banks across the country.
By RANDY COVITZ
The Kansas City Star
PHOENIX _ Chiefs running back Larry Johnson tried clearing up the mystery of the cracked bone in his right foot that caused him to miss the last eight games of the 2007 season.
“I can’t even tell you the medical term,” Johnson said on Wednesday while attending Super Bowl activities. “The bone in my fourth toe by the joint had a slight crack in it, and it shifted a little bit.”
But why all the secrecy? Johnson never disclosed the nature of the injury on the record, and the Chiefs even cited HIPAA privacy laws, something the NFL does not do when it comes to on-field injuries.
“No one knew what I had,” Johnson said. “You can’t diagnose something and not know what it is. My foot was so swollen, no one knew what was going on. They thought it was a Lisfranc, they thought it was my heel, they thought it was my ankle.
“Until you get the CT scans and really rotate my foot with high technology … it’s very, very small, but you’re not going to be able to see it. It looked worse than it was, but at the end of the day, we didn’t know what was wrong.”
The Chiefs elected not to place Johnson on injured reserve until the last week of the season, holding out hope he could play.
“Any time you get a cracked bone or a bone is misplaced, it just takes a while for it to heal,” said Johnson, who said he’s 100 percent now.
“Of course you can run on it, but you’re going to feel an extreme amount of pain if you don’t let it rest for a long amount of time. When I kept trying to come back, I was pushing it too hard where I was always going to have pain.
I think letting it rest a little bit is going to get back to 100 percent like it is.”
Johnson was attending Super Bowl activities promoting a Campbell’s Chunky soup campaign which is donating one million cans to food banks across the country.
