Pain game: AFL great Dermott Brereton spent most of his career playing with painkilling injections

AFL great Dermott Brereton spent most of his career playing with the help of painkilling injections. But does he regret that now?

IF it wasn’t so serious it would have been Dermott Brereton’s weekly party trick.

Friends dropping around at his house on Fridays would witness Brereton literally struggling to get off the couch.

His issues — a bone-on-bone knee lacking any cartilage and a hip complaint that constantly flared.

If you can’t walk, you can’t play.

And yet there he was the next day on the football field, crashing packs and throwing himself about with abandon as a five-time premiership star for Hawthorn.

He wears his scars as a badge of honour and is unapologetic about paying the price.

Brereton estimates he spent most of his career playing with painkilling injections, aware it was the only way he could get onto the field.

“I would estimate I have had 250 injections,” he said.

Dermott Brereton is helped from the field during the 1989 Grand Final.

“The club doctor makes an assessment about whether you are capable of continuing on with a painkilling injection.

“And quite frankly was I at risk of further injury from the hundreds of injections?

“The answer is no, it’s not as if my knee is at further risk.

“I have been bone-on-bone since 19 years of age.

“From 1991 when I was 26 to 31, I would have had my knee injected before every game, frequently at halftime, and then more often than not I had a big knitting needle-sized needle put into the side of the knee on Monday or Tuesday to have the fluid drained out.

“The doctors who are injecting sportsmen are insanely good — it’s why you trust them with your lives.”

The legal drugs of choice were Marcaine (the brand name for bupivacaine) and Xylocaine, agents that dulled the nerve receptors conveying pain signals.

In his 211-game career Brereton needed 24 operations, but the hip and knee issues were a constant from early on.

“When my hips were bad I was getting a lot of injections into my hips,” he said.

“There is no vestige of damage from an incorrectly used injection, not one.

“The only effects are from the actual impact injuries themselves.

Dermott Brereton opens up on painkilling injections. Picture: Getty Images

“There is a stigma attached to injecting, and I think that’s wrong.

“That was the medical advice I was given and I trusted that advice.

“The good doctors are phenomenal — they swear the Hippocratic oath to look after their patients, they make the decision on whether you can get back out there (with assistances) or whether you need to sit it out and come back to fight another day.”

Brereton, now 52, still plays suburban cricket, surfs and trains with players in his part-time capacity with Greater Western Sydney.