When news came down Friday that wide receiver Danny Amendola will miss about six weeks with a sternoclaviular joint separation, it was met with a sigh of relief from Rams fans.
Earlier reports indicated a broken collarbone, which would have kept the Rams without their best receiver for a longer period of time. It was a stroke of good fortune for St. Louis, but a report from Jay Glazer of FOX indicates that the result could have been even worse.
Glazer reports that the clavicle normally pops out, but it went inward toward the aorta and trachea when Amendola was hurt on Thursday night. The team’s medical staff put Amendola to sleep in order to pop the clavicle into place and then pushed it in order to determine if there was a risk of it popping inward again. The medical staff then called doctors from other teams to see if they had ever seen this injury, which is more commonly found in car accidents, and none of them had ever seen it before.
Amendola’s life wasn’t in risk because there was no damage to either the aorta or trachea, but it certainly could have been if his luck was a little worse. Either way, it was more than your garden variety collarbone injury even if the prognosis wound up being a relatively good one for both receiver and team.