AFL Finals 2023: Jeremy Howe details horror recovery from broken arm, Pies’ flag pursuit

After what happened in March, Jeremy Howe can’t believe he’s back on the field. The pain was so bad, he ended up in hospital passed out on ketamine. The star Pie relives the trauma.

Jeremy Howe arm recovery art

Once Jeremy Howe is done with football he could moonlight as a horror writer given his vivid flourish as he details his season from hell.

Call it Howe’s version of the ‘Saw’ movie combined with a detour through ‘Breaking Bad’ given the cruel and unusual punishment he subjected his arm to 25 weeks ago.

The physical pain is slowly easing one millimetre at a time – more on that later – but the reminders of his car crash-style collision with Geelong’s Tyson Stengle are never far away.

As he details a level of agony he has never felt before, the question is asked about whether he gets nightmares thinking of falling from such vast heights.

And there flashing up on a huge Collingwood projector is the footage of Howe on a stretcher in the rooms post-injury as part of a club-produced video detailing his return.

“It’s pretty bloody hard when they are playing it now!’’ he says with a laugh.

Howe is so resilient, so capable of taking everything in his stride that he can easily disarm an audience.

And yet as he tells this masthead, the level of damage was so extensive with the compound fracture that saw his bones break in three places that even he cannot believe he returned to football this season.

Howe broke his arm in a horrific round one incident. Picture: Michael Willson/AFL Photos

“I haven’t watched the incident. I was in hospital for 14 or 16 days and I had dreams of snapping it all the time. Because I heard it snap on game day. I thought it was my AC joint.

“It snapped too. And then ‘Bruzzy’ (Brayden Maynard) came over to check on me. He was like, ‘Holy f***’.

“And then I looked down at my arm and it was just bent (at right angles). Now I was really panicking. Then the next half-hour was the most pain I have ever been in by a mile. I thought my knee injury was pretty bad in 2020.

“This was 10 times worse. Like a blowtorch in the middle of my forearm. Like someone’s just trying to cut my arm off with a blowtorch. I couldn’t handle the pain. They gave me green whistles and it didn’t go until they plugged me into a drip and gave me fentanyl, which is proper strong.

“And then I ended up in hospital and they gave me ketamine to the point where I passed out and then they pulled my arm straight. They yanked it and it went straight back in and I had surgery the next day.”

That traumatic surgery has left only a thin pink scar the length of his forearm that does nothing to detail the extraordinary battering it has taken these past few months.

Howe reels off the damage cheerfully as if it was a grocery list, even as he continues to deal with the legacy of that collision.

“There was so much trauma in there it was like a blender going off. Everything just got shredded from within,” he said.

Howe made a remarkable recovery after the injury. Picture: Quinn Rooney/Getty Images

“A lot of soft tissue damage, the scarring, everything was so gummed up and firm.”

Even now his thumb has permanent pins and needles from the nerve damage as he works three times a week on hand therapy to regain full control of his little finger.

“The arm was never going to be the issue. It was the trauma with the nerves and tendons,” he said.

“The bone came through and snapped the tendon which feeds to my finger. So a lot of the time my finger stuck (straight) it wouldn’t move, It was just dead. I would say, ‘Is this ever going to come back?’”

The answer was his surgeons and therapists didn’t know.

His fingers are so sensitive that taking items from his pockets “makes my blood run cold”.

It means his hand therapy involves playing with buckets of rice or sharp pasta or rubbing velcro across his fingers to try to dull the intense sensation.

The nerves grow back at 1mm a day across a 400m stretch of his arm, so he is confident but not certain of regaining full feeling.

Howe still cannot believe he was back by round 15, especially having determined he would not rush back and delay his return in a reprise of his 2020 knee injury.

“I’m 33, I don’t need injuries. I wanted to get this right for the rest of my life and my old days, so to think I have played 10 games now with the potential to play 13 … to think I would get that much footy in, I am grateful to the team which looked after me because I wouldn’t be here without them,” he said.

Howe is aware of the potential this list has under Craig McRae, still desperate to write the wrongs of the 2018 Grand Final.

The high-flyer is determined to avenge the 2018 Grand Final defeat this season. Photo by Michael Klein.

The agonising nature of that defeat still stings, even as he revealed an untold story from those final frantic minutes as the Pies searched for a winner after Dom Sheed’s boundary-line set shot.

“I was at the top of the goalsquare, and I was steaming. I was so angry. Then after what happened I was still thinking, ‘We are a massive chance, we just need to score’,” he said.

“And then I ended up getting knocked out in a tackle no one knew about. Liam Ryan slung me at the top of the goalsquare and knocked me out with two minutes to go and I blacked out for the rest of the game. I knew we lost but I remember nothing apart from that. I don’t remember them getting their medals or being interviewed. The amount of showtime that (Sheed goal) gets me, it absolutely kills me.”

This time in four weeks Howe hopes he has a chance for redemption.

Just getting back to the football field is something to behold.

Now Howe has a chance to turn that horror story into his own version of a football fairytale.

Originally published as AFL Finals 2023: Jeremy Howe details horror recovery from broken arm, Pies’ flag pursuit