fulce

[yellow chickens]

where the heck is fulce? is he still injured or what? i would think he would have gotten minutes yesterday with the big lead and all. do you think the injury is keeping him back or simply a lack of practice.

[ecompt]

I presume that fractured kneecap is still bothering him.

[bma725]

where the heck is fulce? is he still injured or what? i would think he would have gotten minutes yesterday with the big lead and all. do you think the injury is keeping him back or simply a lack of practice.

Buzz said he would only play based on how much he can tolerate the pain in his knee.  If he's not playing, I'd guess it's bothering him quite a bit.

[🏀]

Fulce to leave the team due to insurmountable injury?

[ChicosBailBonds]

Buzz said he would only play based on how much he can tolerate the pain in his knee.  If he's not playing, I'd guess it's bothering him quite a bit.

That's too bad, hopefully not a season wasted.

[79Warrior]

That's too bad, hopefully not a season wasted.

tend to agree with you. If he was at all able to play, we would have seen him yesterday. Sure seems like this is a nagging injury.

[chapman]

I'm not sure we would have seen Fulce in last night's game if he was healthy.  We had a bigger, more stable lead against Cincinnati and he did not get in until much later.  With things falling apart at the 12 minute mark he wasn't going to get in a game that kept getting closer. 

Buzz said on his show a few weeks back he had hoped to get a good look at Otule and Fulce before Jan. 10 vs. WVU to decide whether or not they would be redshirted.  I'm wondering if we'll hear something shortly.

Another thought is with the injury.  If it's something that he may not recover from, or at least enough to get back to being good enough earn minutes while at MU, it's always possible he won't stay.  It also becomes a decision for Buzz: redshirt him, hoping he gets healthy and improves enough to contribute for the next three years, or don't redshirt him, ensuring that even if he stays around there will be one less year he takes up a scholarship.

[yellow chickens]

these injuries to fulce and otule are really too bad. they are some of the last people who we could afford to get unjured. fulce would have been a perfect reserve to hayward. i hope he can be in good form by February. hopefully he just needs a couple more weeks of practice before Buzz trusts him to not disrupt the flow of our game

[ecompt]

Fulce's injury sounds like it's career-threatening. There's no treatment.

[yellow chickens]

then what is he doing practicing? if it were career threatening i would think we would be getting surgery or at least waiting until it is completely healed. no point throwing away his career for this season. i hope buzz and staff are smart enough to not have him play if his injury is really that bad. this leads me to believe that his injury is not a bad as some are saying.

[Hards Alumni]

then what is he doing practicing? if it were career threatening i would think we would be getting surgery or at least waiting until it is completely healed. no point throwing away his career for this season. i hope buzz and staff are smart enough to not have him play if his injury is really that bad. this leads me to believe that his injury is not a bad as some are saying.

you don't understand.  no treatment means it cannot heal, and there is no surgery.

it ends his career.  As in, no more playing.

[yellow chickens]

you don't understand.  no treatment means it cannot heal, and there is no surgery.

it ends his career.  As in, no more playing.

then explain why he is practicing and has played in two games

[rocky_warrior]

Fulce's injury sounds like it's career-threatening. There's no treatment.

I've heard that a few times - but either I don't understand the injury, or the injury has been misstated.

If it's really a fractured/split kneecap, it *can* heal.   You can also have surgery to bolt it back together, but I guess the bolts get painful so they're usually removed once it's sufficiently healed.

http://orthopedics.about.com/od/brokenbones/a/patella.htm

So - unless I'm mistaken, it sound like it can heal with time. 

[Hards Alumni]

then explain why he is practicing and has played in two games

because like most injuries they take time to FULLY heal.  Just because he CAN move around on it doesn't mean he SHOULD.  Likely he is trying to play through it to help the team out, but frequently he cannot go because of the pain.  He is probably planning on toughing it out until the season is over and then he will rest until it is fully healed. 

of course, injuries like this do not heal on their own all the time, and even if they do, they are often nothing like the kneecap that he had before the injury.  When a bone breaks you dont get surgery to repair it, typically.  Also, by practicing and playing on it he runs the risk of more damage... which would probably end his career.  Not everyone comes back from knee injuries.  There are countless professional athletes that screw up their knees and never play another game.

there are a lot of tendons and ligaments in the knee to worry about... my roomate tore his patellar tendon twice during college.  He came back to fast from the injury and overworked it and set himself back an entire year.

Just because it MIGHT be career threatening doesn't mean that it IS.  Most likely the training staff is taking a 'wait and see' approach with the injury since there really is no treatment.

[bma725]

I've heard that a few times - but either I don't understand the injury, or the injury has been misstated.

If it's really a fractured/split kneecap, it *can* heal.   You can also have surgery to bolt it back together, but I guess the bolts get painful so they're usually removed once it's sufficiently healed.

http://orthopedics.about.com/od/brokenbones/a/patella.htm

So - unless I'm mistaken, it sound like it can heal with time. 

Buzz called it a split kneecap, which is not the same thing as a broken patella, though it sounds the same.  Broken patella usually has the entire knee cap fractured.  Either that or a chip, but generally its something straight accross the entire length of it.  Fulce's injury is in the middle of the patella with edges remaining intact, basically like a hole.

Normally, a split kneecap like that is a congenital issue, but in rare occasions breaks can happen that way.  Split kneecaps due not heal with time, but they also don't get worse either.  They can be fixed with surgery if the pain is unbearable, but the recovery time is quite long.

[rocky_warrior]

Normally, a split kneecap like that is a congenital issue, but in rare occasions breaks can happen that way.  Split kneecaps due not heal with time, but they also don't get worse either.  They can be fixed with surgery if the pain is unbearable, but the recovery time is quite long.

Thanks bma - I still don't completely get it, but that's why I'm not a doctor :0  One more question.  Perhaps we've seen it here, but is this from a recent injury, or is it a condition that he's had for a long time that just became a problem? 

[bma725]

Thanks bma - I still don't completely get it, but that's why I'm not a doctor :0  One more question.  Perhaps we've seen it here, but is this from a recent injury, or is it a condition that he's had for a long time that just became a problem? 

The problem is we just don't know enough.  Buzz called it a split kneecap, but I don't know that he really meant a split kneecap.

Normally , a split kneecap is something you have from birth.  Unless no one checked before, that's not the case here.  Normally a split kneecap does not get worse over time, Fulce went from stress reaction to stress fracture to this.  Normally a split kneecap doesn't rob you of athletic ability, Buzz said he didn't think Fulce would ever be the player he was pre-injury.

On the other hand, this doesn't fit a patella fracture either.  Normally, with a fractured patella you would not be practicing or playing because you'd be spending time off your feet trying to get it to heal.  You also wouldn't have the type of break Buzz described, which was basically a hole in the middle of the kneecap.

In short, I don't think we've got enough information to say whether Fulce is healthy enough or not health enough to be playing, or whether he's doing any harm to himself.  They said pain would be the guide, so we just have to assume that he's in too much pain. 

[bilsu]

tend to agree with you. If he was at all able to play, we would have seen him yesterday. Sure seems like this is a nagging injury.

He is more lost on defense and offense than Otule is. He is not going to play until he will not hurt the team when he is in.

[Rollout-the-Barrel]

Purely speculation, but could be chondromalacia of the patella which is the break down of the cartilage underneath the knee cap.  Another possibility is breakdown of the patella ligament attachment to the patella itself or the quad tendon attachment to the patella, but I don't think they would let him play if this was what was bothering him.  The problem with chondromalacia is there is not too much you can do for it besides rest. A more aggressive option is to drill small holes into the patella to encourage blood to form "new cartilage" or try cartilage replacement which would definitely put him out for the rest of the year.  However, totally speculative and like BMA said it's hard to really know what Buzz meant by "split kneecap".

[bs4173]

Purely speculation, but could be chondromalacia of the patella which is the break down of the cartilage underneath the knee cap.  Another possibility is breakdown of the patella ligament attachment to the patella itself or the quad tendon attachment to the patella, but I don't think they would let him play if this was what was bothering him.  The problem with chondromalacia is there is not too much you can do for it besides rest. A more aggressive option is to drill small holes into the patella to encourage blood to form "new cartilage" or try cartilage replacement which would definitely put him out for the rest of the year.  However, totally speculative and like BMA said it's hard to really know what Buzz meant by "split kneecap".

MU physical therapy alum? 

[Big Papi]

I guess I still don't know what his injury is but I do know that he is not playing because he is lost on both the offensive and defensive end of the floor.  He might be able to contribute some minutes by the end of the season but I kind of doubt it.  I do expect him to be a major contributor next year as he does have a lot of talent.  Unfortunately he has lost to much practice to be productive this year.

[Rollout-the-Barrel]

MU physical therapy alum? 

Guilty.

[Blackhat]

We need someone to talk to Fulce and get the first hand account how he's doing.   Because when I see Fulce in the game he still looks smooth and long even though it looks like some of his explosiveness isn't there.   But you can't tell me we can't use that length right now unless he's just getting out-muscled in practice.   Something's not right because there's no way he can be that far behind Butler. 

[tower912]

Regardless of the condition of Fulce's knee, he is "10 games and 42 practices" behind Butler.    Probably a combination of tentativeness regarding the knee and not picking up the defensive rotations as quickly as we would like.

[Pago Warrior]

Purely speculation, but could be chondromalacia of the patella which is the break down of the cartilage underneath the knee cap.  Another possibility is breakdown of the patella ligament attachment to the patella itself or the quad tendon attachment to the patella, but I don't think they would let him play if this was what was bothering him.  The problem with chondromalacia is there is not too much you can do for it besides rest. A more aggressive option is to drill small holes into the patella to encourage blood to form "new cartilage" or try cartilage replacement which would definitely put him out for the rest of the year.  However, totally speculative and like BMA said it's hard to really know what Buzz meant by "split kneecap".

OT: Wow! Just today I was just told that ACI, an even more invasion procedure, could be in my future if my knee doesn't respond well to the scope I recently had done.  Reliving Helfaer rec center glory days could soon be a thing of the past for me...