When a young athlete needs Tommy John surgery, the player isn’t the only impacted party; it’s a significant challenge for parents as well.
Tommy John surgery is the informal name for the surgical procedure to repair a damaged ulnar collateral ligament—or UCL.
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Torn UCLs are commonly seen among baseball pitchers, as the ligament is under tremendous stress from the motion of throwing a ball with the competitive velocity seen more frequently in baseball than ever before.
The injury, as KPRC 2 Investigates reported on Tuesday, has become increasingly common among athletes of all ages and requires extensive rehabilitation for the best chance at a full recovery.
KPRC 2 digital producer Michael Horton spoke with the mother of a Houston-area pitcher who is in the midst of recovering from Tommy John surgery.
The baseball mom tallied together cost of their initial doctor’s appointment, the surgery and the physical therapy that followed. Altogether, the bill is around $135,000. So far, out-of-pocket and insurance payments have covered $38,000 of that bill.
If you thought that total was high, it doesn’t include indirect expenses, such as the gas required to make the 45-minute drive across Houston once every week to attend physical therapy sessions.
This is a tremendous financial and personal commitment for the family, but she said the doctors gave them two options: have the surgery or never pitch again.
“We then had to ask ourselves, do we really want to have surgery?” she said.
In her son’s case, he might have had to quit baseball altogether without the operation. His arm pain extended beyond throwing fastballs, and even casually tossing the ball around caused severe discomfort.
“We decided we had to have this done,” she added. “That’s what caused it to be stressful. We felt like we had to have the surgery done—not because of sports, but because of, the day-to-day long-term pain associated,” she added.
The pitcher’s recovery is in full swing with National Pitching Association, a nation-wide pitching performance company with a location in Houston.
Dean Doxakis, one of the top pitching performance coaches in the nation, heads up the company’s operations based on the city’s southwest side. Doxakis recently admitted that 65% of his clients are rehabilitating injuries. The mother says her son hopes to be back on the mound as soon as November.
Now that the surgery is out of the way and the rehabilitation process is in full effect, the mother has had the chance to reflect on the process as a whole. Here’s the advice that she would give to parents in a similar situation:
If you suspect your child has a pitching injury, don’t wait to get it looked at
“We probably lost a couple of months during diagnosis [stage], because we thought it was overuse. So, we just had him resting and, you know, had we really pushed on to get the MRI early on, we would have found out what was going on sooner.”
Do your research, and have a second opinion
“Even though [the doctor we saw] is amazing, we still wanted to get a second opinion, and we went with another amazing doctor. They are both amazing physicians and surgeons in this field, and they both were in agreement that this needed to happen.”
Do your research
As a parent. If you have a pitcher, become well educated about proper arm care. I don’t feel that we were, and we were taking recommendations from different people—you know, coaches here and there, but that wasn’t necessarily an entire arm-care program. It’s not their fault; we should have sought out true professionals, which we’re doing now. I feel like if parents really educate themselves about finding a proper arm care and pitching program, then they can potentially avoid the overuse.”
Communicate with their coaches
“Be in communication with their coaches, if possible, about how they can still be part of the sport they love. From that standpoint, our high school coach was amazing because even though [my son] had surgery, and he knew he was having surgery, he still put him on the team. He still put him on the roster. He allowed him to be part of the team. He traveled with them as much as he could and was still in the dugout with them... He was there, part of the team. I feel like that really helped, address the emotional side that that the athletes feel about being left out when they’re not able to play the sport.”
Help them emotionally adjust to sitting out
“I think it’s important to help your athlete be comfortable, because they’re going to want to come back to it. It’s just hard to sit out and be injured for the amount of time that the recovery is, which is almost a year. So, we also tried to keep him occupied with other things. He’s lifeguarding now. He got a job, you know, just to fill that void. Because obviously, his friends are playing summer ball right now. And so, you know, we just needed to fill our time with other things so that we are not facing that emotional low and missing the sport as much as we could be.”
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