6 more weeks they say. Connor Bedard suffered a fractured jaw on January 5th after receiving a body check to the face.
Welcome back everybody, my name is Dr. Stefan Wilson and this channel is here to help with the understanding of sports injuries.
We remember way back on January 5th when the Blackhawks were playing the Devils and Connor Bedard was skating into the offensive zone with the puck when Brenden Smith caught him with a high body check where his right shoulder made contact with Bedard’s face. When we slow down the replay here we can pretty much isolate the moment of impact here where the mechanism of injury occurred. Here we can see Smith’s right shoulder making direct contact with the left side of Bedard’s jaw with what must have been some significant force. Bedard is only 18 years old so he is no danger of having any kind of osteopenic low bone density or degenerative bone pathology like osteoporosis. So without a predisposed weakening of his jaw, you will require a lot of force to cause a fracture. On the flip side though, again Bedard is only 18 years old so his body’s ability to heal from this type of injury is very good. Originally it was stated that Bedard was expected to be out of the lineup for 6-8 weeks. I thought this prognostic timeline was a little on the optimistic side considering he did have surgery and his return to play would have to allow for full contact in a team practice environment prior to him being given clearance for league play. Six more weeks as of today does technically still keep Bedard within the original return to play timeline, but I would suspect it might be a bit longer than that considering head coach Luke Richardson said in an interview yesterday that Bedard is still not able to clench hard or exert himself physically.
I want to take a moment here to look at the anatomy model of the jaw bone which is called the mandible. We see the vertical section of the mandible here with the boney parts called the condyle. These form what is called your temporomandibular joint which is basically your jaw joint. In order to open your mouth and take a bite of a cheeseburger this joint has two actions, it must rotate like a hinge and then translate or slide. When these actions occur symmetrically on both the right and left sides, then you can happily take a bite of that cheeseburger. But when a body check from Brenden Smith hits you right on the left side of your mandible, this can cause a fracture. The classification of mandibular fractures can be very complex but the main point of interest here is where they commonly occur. Most often a mandibular fracture will occur through the condyle, which is right here, followed by most often in the body, right here and then in the angle which is right here
I hope you found this interesting and I wish Connor Bedard a speedy recovery.
Take care.
