Here’s Exactly What Happens When You Break Your Neck
Olympic snowboarding viewers around the world collectively cringed as we watched Austrian Olympic snowboarder Markus Schairer take a scary fall while competing in the quarterfinals of the snowboard cross last week. During his crash on the course’s last jump, Schairer went flying through the air and landed on his upper back and neck. He landed so hard that his goggles popped off and he laid on the ground while the competition finished.
Schairer ended up fracturing his fifth cervical vertebra, according to USA Today. But, amazingly, he was still able to get to his feet and finish the race—with a broken neck. The Austrian Olympic committee said in a statement that Schairer didn’t suffer any serious permanent damage, and is expected to be OK.
But that, along with Japanese snowboarder Yuto Totsuka's near miss at the halfpipe event a few days earlier, left us wondering what it really means to break your neck—and how often you're able to walk (or snowboard) away from such a serious injury.
It turns out there are a lot of different types of injuries that can be called "breaking your neck."
A broken neck simply means that you have a fracture in any part of the seven bones that make up the cervical (i.e. neck) section of your spine, Thomas D. Cha, M.D., assistant chief of spine surgery at Massachusetts General Hospital and an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School, tells SELF. “Fractures come in all shapes and sizes, and can involve single or multiple vertebrae,” he says.
“’Breaking your neck’ is a layman’s term for a whole series of injuries,” Payam Farjoodi, M.D., an orthopedic spine surgeon at the Spine Health Center at MemorialCare Orange Coast Medical Center in Fountain Valley, Calif., tells SELF. You can break or chip a bone, you can have a break that causes a bone to lose alignment, or you can have a break that causes the bone to go through your skin, Dr. Farjoodi says.
Neck injuries can be paralyzing or even fatal if they involve damage to the spinal cord, which runs through the vertebrae.
If your injury causes your vertebrae to become misaligned, you could be in trouble because that means they might cause damage to the spinal cord. “It really depends on whether any bone or ligament impinges on the spinal cord itself,” Steven Agabegi, M.D., an orthopedic spine surgeon and assistant professor at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine, tells SELF. If that happens, the injury can lead to paralysis or even death.
The bones in your neck are numbered (C1 connects directly to your skull and C7 is all the way at the base of your neck), and damage to some bones tends to be more dangerous than others, Ryan O’Connor, D.O., a spine specialist and assistant clinical professor at Michigan State University, tells SELF.
“As a general rule of thumb, fractures that involve the upper cervical spine (C1, C2, C3) are most dangerous because spinal cord/nerve injury at this level can result in instant death as our ability to breathe is tied to nerve responses generated in the upper cervical spine,” Justin J. Park, M.D., an orthopedic spine surgeon at the Maryland Spine Center at Mercy Medical Center, tells SELF. But again, the way that the fracture happens, and the displacement of bone or disc are the biggest factors in determining how intense the neck injury may be, he says.
Neck injuries are serious, and doctors will generally do an X-ray and CT scan quickly to try to figure out what’s going on.
If you’re able to get up and walk away, and you have movement in your arms and legs, it’s usually a pretty good sign that you’re going to have a good outcome, Dr. Agabegi says. In those cases without spinal cord damage, doctors will usually put you in a neck brace for two to six weeks to help calm your muscles and control the pain, Dr. Farjoodi says. You’ll also likely get some kind of pain medication to help you get through it, but it's likely that you'll heal "just fine," he says.
However, you’ll probably need to go to physical therapy for a few months to work on regaining motion in your neck and build up those muscles, Dr. O’Connor says. Usually, you can go back to playing sports three months after your injury.
If you can’t move, or you have numbness or tingling in certain areas of your body, it could be a sign that you’ve injured your spinal cord, Dr. O’Connor says.
If doctors suspect your spinal cord has been damaged, they'll make sure you get an MRI, Dr. O’Connor says. According to the Mayo Clinic, an MRI can also help detect blood clots, herniated discs, or anything else that may be pressing on the spinal cord.
Once an MRI confirms that your neck injury is more serious, in many cases, you’ll be rushed into surgery pretty quickly, Dr. Agabegi says, which is needed to remove any fragments of bone that may be compressing the spine. It also helps stabilize the spine in order to help prevent any future pain, the Mayo Clinic explains.
For these more serious injuries, the recovery timeline varies. Some people don’t recover from these injuries and will live with paralysis, Dr. Park points out, while others may need to undergo therapy to learn to walk or use their limbs again. “Most people have some impairment long-term,” Dr. Agabegi says. In these cases, patients may need to use medical devices to help them stay mobile and independent as well as restore some function.
Ultimately, doctors aren’t shocked that Schairer was able to walk away from his injury. But given how fast he was going and how hard he landed, Dr. Agabegi says he was “very fortunate.”
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