Amerks’ Fitzpatrick to miss 4 to 6 weeks
Rory Fitzpatrick went into surgery on Monday to repair a hernia.
He came out of recovery to quite a surprise.
His surgeon, Dr. Joseph Johnson, didn’t fix one hernia but rather three.
“Any time you have surgery you don’t want them to find anything else,” the Rochester Americans captain said on Tuesday evening, “but at least this explains the pain.”
Fitzpatrick said he will miss between four and six weeks, then it should be all systems go for the remainder of the season.
Of course, he has thought that before.
“I thought I had it solved a long time ago,” he said.
The 34-year-old lifelong resident of Irondequoit had been battling lower abdominal discomfort since September. The breakdown of scar tissue from sports hernia surgery last spring was believed to be causing the pain at the start of the season.
The term “sports hernia” is somewhat misleading in that it really isn’t a hernia. Rather, it is a tear in the sheet-like tendon that connects an abdominal muscle to the bone in the groin area.
Dealing with the pain from the scar-tissue breakdown ultimately may have caused the three inguinal hernias to form, Fitzpatrick said. A hernia is the protruding of the intestine through the abdominal wall or into the inguinal canal in the groin area.
“I had the one injury and tried to play through it, overcompensated and then had all this going,” Fitzpatrick said.
When he underwent the surgery to repair the sports hernia, Fitzpatrick said his surgeon told him his abdominal wall was unusually thin. Mesh was used during surgery on Monday to strengthen the area, he said.
Fitzpatrick has played in just eight of 16 games. The Amerks take a 13-2-1 record into their only game this week, at home Friday against Syracuse.
