Inside Jahrome Hughes’ miracle return from a broken arm to the NRL grand finals
Just three weeks after breaking his arm, Jahrome Hughes was back for Storm’s preliminary final win over the Sharks to set up another grand final. This is how he conjured a Melbourne miracle.
The away team sheds at Suncorp Stadium can be a miserable place for visiting sides. That was certainly the case for the Melbourne Storm a few weeks ago, having been put to the sword by the Brisbane Broncos in the final week of the regular season.
The scoreline that night, however, was only a minor concern. The greater issue was star halfback Jahrome Hughes, whose comeback from shoulder surgery that night came to a premature end when left the field in the first half with a fractured forearm.
What began as a litmus test for his shoulder injury lasted only 25 minutes as a dejected Hughes made his way up the tunnel with his season on the brink.
Hughes was shattered. He feared the worst. So, no doubt, did most of the purple army. At that point, Hughes looked like he needed a miracle to play again this season.
As teammates consoled their stricken star, Melbourne medical staff began making hasty phone calls as they organised scans and valiantly looked to give Hughes a shot at playing again this year.
Yes, Hughes needed a miracle, but the Storm were ready to give it a shake. What followed was a frantic 24 hours – and a frenetic three weeks – as Hughes and the Storm chased a shot at the impossible.
“It was obviously a pretty tough time and I was devastated,” Hughes said.
“I even rang my wife and shed a bit of a tear thinking the year was over. I have a lot of belief in this team and confidence in this team that we could do something special this year.
“I guess that was a really big thing – I was going to miss out on it all and watch from the sidelines. So it was a bit of an emotional rollercoaster after that.
“It was a tough night I guess not just because of the pain, but obviously thinking I was out for the year.”
Hughes had resigned himself to spending the rest of the season watching the Storm chase a premiership from the sidelines. So had coach Craig Bellamy and his teammates.
The club’s medical staff had other ideas and if there is a hero in this story, it is the doctors and physical performance staff who defied logic to get Hughes back for the grand final.
This is the story of how they achieved the impossible.
THE SHEDS
The image is hard to forget because it was so confronting. Hughes wanted to give his dodgy shoulder a hitout before the finals so Melbourne, with a top two spot and home final in their keeping, decided to send out their talismanic halfback against the Broncos in a game that didn’t mean a whole lot in the scheme of their season.
The landscape dramatically changed midway though the opening half when Hughes hurt his arm attempting to tackle Broncos forward Brendan Piakua. Hughes was in discomfort but he stayed on the field and tried to ride it out.
The Storm No.7 only conceded defeat when he attempted to throw a pass midway though the half and it fumbled out of his hands. Hughes, one of the game’s elite players, immediately put his hand up, made his way off the field and headed straight up the tunnel accompanied by the Storm’s long-serving doctor Jason Chan and the club’s high performance staff.
Chan, the Storm’s doctor of 20 years, retired at the end of last year but had stayed on as an advisor. He was only in Brisbane because his successor had taken time off after having a baby.
Chan quickly kicked into gear. He instantly knew he was dealing with something serious because he could feel the bones in Hughes’ arm crunching as he did his initial testing.
The Storm’s medical staff did their best to stay positive. They put Hughes in plaster from his wrist to his elbow to stop him rotating his wrist, which helped prevent swelling.
Hughes was urged to keep his arm elevated while he was given Tranexamic acid, a drug that is usually given to women to treat heavy menstrual bleeding.
The sole focus was to control blood flow and decrease swelling. Having done their best to do just that, Chan immediately reached out to doctor Andrew Oppy, an orthopaedic surgeon with a specific interest in the management of trauma injuries who he knew well and the club had used before.
When he didn’t answer the phone, Chan tried another surgeon who said he could operate on Hughes on Sunday. Then Oppy called back and said he could do the surgery on Friday.
Again, the sooner the surgery could be carried out, the greater opportunity there was to control the swelling and fast-track Hughes’ return.
As Chan sorted out the surgery, captain Harry Grant – who was watching the Broncos game from the sideline – was doing his best to lift Hughes’ spirits.
“It was pretty disappointing,” Grant said.
“Jahrome was pretty flat, pretty shattered. He came in straight away in a cast and sling. Everyone understood that he wasn’t going to be in a good state, it wasn’t looking good.
“You’re trying to lift his spirits. I remember going back into his room that night and he was not too good. That’s the thing like after a game or whatever, you go to the worst case scenario.
“But once you have the scans and you get a bit of the medical advice, then you’re in a position to better understand the situation really.
“I think he sort of early in the wake of the scans he got surgery done, maybe Saturday got surgery done.
“Then the physios and doctors gave him a little bit of hope and I think he just grabbed onto that hope and put himself in the picture to make sure he could get back.”
THE SURGERY
Hughes flew back into Melbourne on Friday and went straight into surgery. Oppy spent Friday morning on the golf course and was shooting one of the rounds of his life, but left the course to operate on Hughes.
Hughes revealed on his podcast with teammates Cameron Munster and Ryan Papenhuyzen that Oppy had turned up in his golf gear.
“Every second Friday, I play golf,” Oppy said.
“I cut it short to come in and do it. I walked off the 13th hole, I think I was on 27 points or something.
“I was doing all right. I didn’t realise he had told that story until someone told me he had said it on his podcast.”
Hughes had suffered a “Galeazzi fracture”, which involves a break in the distal third of the radius bone and a dislocation of the distal radioulnar joint.
It is a complex fracture but the treatment is relatively straight forward. Oppy reconnected the bone with a plate and eight screws – he used a larger plate than usual to provide more protection to the broken bone.
In his words, it was like a carpenter fixing a broken bit of wood and putting it back perfectly straight and aligned.
Hughes wasn’t out of the woods. The risk of infection was still a concern. Normally, after surgery like Hughes had, the patient would be in a plaster cast for a couple of weeks.
The Storm and Hughes couldn’t afford that because it would have immobilised the wrist and it would have stiffened.
So Hughes had the cast removed the next day when he left the hospital. The Storm immediately put Hughes on antibiotics to reduce the risk of infection and glued the wound, which they hoped would negate the greatest risk – if the wound struggled, Hughes would have struggled.
With the cast off, he could still grip the ball but he had to avoid sweating, again to protect against infection. Passing and running was off limits for seven days.
The good news is, he emerged from the surgery with hope.
“The boys lost (in Brisbane) so I felt like I let the boys down,” Hughes said.
“I had to get over it pretty quick. I got an X-ray and it was a clean snap of the forearm. I got rushed into the surgery straight away and I think once the surgeon came in and said we’ll get you back playing this year, I honestly thought he was geeing up a bit.
“I thought he was just trying to keep me happy because I was down in the dumps. But after the surgery he came and saw me and said everything went well and we’ll get you back on the field soon.
“I probably still thought he was lying. But once I got back to the club and saw the docs and physio, they sort of said the same thing and gave me a bit of a recovery plan and what I needed to do to get back at.
“Once I had that reassurance from the surgeon first and then the medical team at the club, obviously I would do everything in my power to get back in play, if not the prelim then maybe the grand final.”
The race was on.
TICKING BOXES
Hughes had a ball back in his hands after two days. He couldn’t run or break into a sweat but he quickly learned that gripping wouldn’t be a problem.
On that front, his wife Molly may have played an unexpected role. Molly is pregnant with their first child and while her husband was sidelined, she enlisted him to help set up their nursery.
“Early on it was just letting the wound heal and keeping it elevated when I was at home and that sort of stuff,” Hughes said.
“Obviously I had to have compression on it in the early days. My wife is pregnant so she wasn’t helping me with anything – I was more trying to help her out, I guess.
“Maybe that was the key – I was putting up the nursery, putting a cot up and building drawers. Doing all the screws – maybe that helped the wrist.”
Hughes worked feverishly with the Storm’s head physio Liam Robinson and spent hours attached to an Exogen bone stimulator, a device which uses low-intensity pulsed ultrasound to accelerate the healing of fractures.
After 11 days, Hughes was allowed to start sprinting and kicking, which ticked the second box. Three days later Hughes returned to first team training and controlled contact, which is where teammate Shawn Blore entered the equation.
Blore had suffered a throat injury against the Sydney Roosters in the penultimate round of the regular season and was rehabilitating alongside Hughes.
He became Hughes’ contact partner. The pair felt their way through the furtive stages of contact as Hughes regained the confidence to perform more rigorous testing on his forearm.
“We had to find a balance because with my throat, the risk was sort of getting hit in the same spot again,” Blore said.
“So it was more just conversations between both of us. I would let Jahrome know, you go as hard as you need to, just stay within yourself if you have to.
“I wouldn’t run flat out, I would just run at a pace where you can sort of gauge what contact is comfortable for him.
“It just went from there. When we did that first tackle and sort of got over that hump where it feels okay, we would go up from there.
“It’s just unreal when you think about it. He is a tough, tough fella. That’s for sure. A few times there we got together at the end (of training) and he was wearing a bloody massive pad with a steel plate inside of it.
“We could virtually go one-on-one, just get a feel for what’s going on. I could tell from the first time we did contact together, he didn’t feel any different at all, he didn’t lose any strength.
“If anything he felt stronger. You think about that – he had eight weeks of rehab on that shoulder as well. So he felt stronger than he did before, which is surprising.
“To me, he felt really good to go as any player would.”
There was still one box to tick. Hughes would return with padding on his arm but he needed to get it approved by the NRL.
The NRL’s chief medical officer doctor Sharron Flahive made a special trip to Melbourne to inspect Hughes’ arm guard.
It is understood she gave the padding the green light, albeit with some additional padding. Hughes was ready to return.
THE COMEBACK
Storm fans held their breath last weekend when Hughes made his comeback against Cronulla in the preliminary final, barely three weeks after snapping his forearm in half.
If there were any nerves, they quickly disappeared as the Melbourne half had his way with the Sharks. There were no signs of hesitation. No tentativeness.
Perhaps his try in the first half summed his comeback up best as he sliced through the Sharks and put a fend into the chest of a Cronulla forward using his damaged arm.
Hughes’ fracture hasn’t healed but the Storm and their star half have taken a calculated gamble. The fracture is stronger than it was last week, but the risk is still there.
Maybe not as big as it was in the preliminary final, but a risk nonetheless.
“The thing for me was how confident he was, how confident he was that he’d be OK,” coach Craig Bellamy said.
“The medical people, I obviously needed to talk to them to make sure I got the all clear there. Not for one second did he doubt he could do it.”
Hughes and the Storm have defied logic to get this far. They have achieved what initially appeared impossible. The only thing standing between them another premiership now is the Brisbane Broncos on Sunday bought at Accor Stadium.
Just one more box to tick.
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