NEW YORK -- Mike Utley of the Detroit Lions will be paralyzed from the chest down, his doctors said yesterday, but should retain the major use of his hands and arms.
"It's really too early to tell, but he should be able to lead a full, productive life," said Dr. Phillip Mayer, the chief of spinal injuries at Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit.
He operated on Utley on Monday, a day after the 6-foot-6-inch, 290-pound guard suffered a severe spinal cord injury when he fell and landed on his head during a game against the Los Angeles Rams at the Pontiac Silverdome.
The injury, one of three paralyzing ones to NFL players since 1978, was described by Lions coach Wayne Fontes as a freakish accident. It occurred when Utley, who was blocking on a pass play on which the Lions scored a touchdown, lost his balance and was unable to break his fall with his hands.
Mayer described Utley as a high-order paraplegic, meaning he has no sensation or control below the waist, and a low-order quadriplegic, meaning he has also lost some, but not all, upper-body functions.
An injury of this type incapacitates an estimated 10,000 to 12,000 Americans a year, almost half of them in automobile accidents, often in falls and increasingly through acts of violence, principally gang warfare, according to the National Spinal Cord Injury Association.
About one-sixth of these injuries are attributed to sports, although two-thirds of these are recreational diving accidents. Football is the leading organized sport associated with spinal-column injuries.
According to Dr. Fred Mueller, the head of the National Center for Catastrophic Sports Injury Research at the University of North Carolina, Utley is only the second professional football player to suffer such a paralyzing spinal-cord injury since wide receiver Daryl Stingley of the New England Patriots became a quadriplegic when he was hit during an exhibition game in 1978.
The other, far less serious, recent professional injury occurred in 1989 when safety Jeff Fuller of the San Francisco 49ers lost some of the use of his right arm after a helmet-to-helmet collision during a game against the Patriots.
Mayer said that because Utley had feeling and some movement in his hands and fingers -- a bit more in the left hand than the right -- return of full motor functions could be reasonably expected during extensive rehabilitation.
