‘Bones heal well’: The road to recovery for Alice Capsey
During the first One Day International against the West Indies back on 4 December, Alice Capsey’s seemingly inevitable appearance for England at her inaugural international tournament was thrown into doubt.
In the sixth over of the West Indies chase of 307, Capsey went over in agony holding her shoulder after attempting to field the ball on the fine leg boundary. After being down for a few minutes, and eventually being removed from the field of play, it was revealed that Capsey had broken her left collarbone.
A day later, the ECB came out with a statement saying, “Alice Capsey sustained an injury on the field during the first ODI against West Indies Women.
“Upon further examination, she has broken her left collarbone and will be unavailable for the remainder of England Women’s tour.
“Capsey will now return home to the UK.”
However, fast forward to 11 February and Capsey was back in an England shirt, playing an important role in England Women’s pursuit of a first World T20 trophy since 2009.
The highlight of her tournament was scoring a quick-fire 50 off 21 balls against Ireland in the group stages, which helped England achieve a semi-final place.
Despite Capsey’s and England’s best efforts, they fell short of achieving their goal after being knocked out by hosts South Africa in the semi-finals.
In spite of her recent injury, Capsey played every game at the Women’s T20 World cup.
This begs the question of how did she recover so quickly?
How long does it take to recover from a broken collarbone?
To learn more, the Sports Gazette spoke to Claire Mcloughlin, the subject leader of Sports Rehabilitation at St Mary’s University.
“With the collarbone, it usually takes six to eight weeks for the bone to heal,” Mcloughlin states.
“So she’s (Capsey) in that timeframe of her bone healing. When we go through bone healing stages, depending on the bone, how big it is, and how thick it is, the longer it may take to heal. So, this is quite a small bone, it’s not a hugely thick bone; therefore, you’d probably be on the lower end of six weeks rather than the upper end of eight weeks.
“From that perspective, she hasn’t damaged a major big bone. It isn’t a bone that would necessarily have to take the weight and take a longer time to heal. The type of fracture that she’s had (communitive fracture) means that it’s broken in a number of places. So, it’s not just one nice clean break, it’s broken in a couple of places.”
The rehabilitation process
With injuries to athletes, the expectation would be to ease them into rehabilitation. But due to the fact Capsey had surgery on the shoulder, Mcloughlin states this could start sooner than expected.
Surgery ✅ shoulder back in one piece ✅ forever setting off airport security scans ✅
Road to getting back out on the park with the girls starts now!! pic.twitter.com/UUzSmlUgzP
— Alice Capsey (@AliceCapsey) December 8, 2022
She continued: “Because it’s been fixed with a plate and pin, as long as the swelling has gone down and the pains gone down, you would start the early stage rehabilitation quite soon.
“You would want to keep the arm mobile, so you would start off with some circular action, we could put them in a swimming pool and get them to do some gentle movements, just to stop the shoulder stiffening and freezing up.
“Obviously, she’d be doing her other training, cardiovascular training on a bike just to keep that fitness level up. She may do some running in a pool to keep that fitness level up.
“They’d look at her nutrition. She would have probably had more calcium, vitamin D, phosphorous and minerals that are going to help with that accelerating healing of the bone.
“They would have done quite a lot of intervention and she would have started rehabilitation and keeping that shoulder moving from probably week two onwards.”
Is this likely to occur again?
When asked whether this injury will reoccur, Mcloughlin simply replies: “Bones heal well.”
“The best injury to have is a bone injury because it’s a solid material, bones heal well. So, the likelihood of this reoccurring, as long as it’s healed properly, she’s done her rehabilitation, which no physio would allow her to return to play without having a full range of motion in the arm.
“So, it looks like Capsey has done what she needs to do in terms of being able to go back and return to play.
“Bones never break in the same place twice, a bit like lightning doesn’t hit you in the same place twice, because it heals stronger when it’s been broken than originally before it was broken.”
After playing in all five of England Women’s T20 World Cup games, Capsey has a short rest before she’s back in the field of play.
She was picked up by the Delhi Capitals in the inaugural Women’s IPL for £75,000 and will be looking to build on an impressive start to her career.
