When Indianapolis mother Carrie Clark heard that there was a new trampoline attraction for toddlers at her local trampoline park, she thought it was a great idea to let his son Cooper play there.
“I thought it was a good activity to get him exercise and maybe wear him out a little before naptime,” she told reporters. “I was a first-time mum. I thought I was just doing something fun with my child.”
At the trampoline park, Cooper broke his leg and returned home with a bright orange toe-to-waist cast that wrapped around his torso.
Now Carrie is left with so many questions, and she’s not the only one.
READ: This popular children’s attraction can be dangerous for kids
More and more people who has suffered from trampoline injuries are coming forward and letting their stories know.
Andrew Dodd is one of these people. “I did a double front flip and landed on my neck,” he said. The fall left him paralysed.
“The doctors said he smashed his spinal cord pretty good,” Andrew’s father Bruce said. “So they say he’ll never walk again.”
Unlike Andrew, Cooper wasn’t doing crazy flips and twists. He was just jumping, a fact that Susan wanted to emphasise.
“Jumping,” she said, “just jumping with no other kids around him. And he’s two. I didn’t see how that could possibly break a leg. How can jumping just a few inches on a trampoline end up in a fractured left femur?”
An orthopaedic surgeon at Riley Hospital for Children, Randall Loder has bad news – fractures in children are very common.
“Paediatric bone is different than adult bone,” he explained. “The younger child’s bone, it’s softer. It’s more compressible. It’s spongy. Paediatric bone can fail relatively easily. If the forces are just right, it can snap.”
Some people think that a fracture in a child is a simple thing just to put a cast on, but they are wrong.
If a fracture reaches the growth plate, it becomes a different problem altogether. A soft cartilage tissue near the end of children’s bones, growth plates are responsible for a child’s ability to grow taller.
Once injured, the bone’s ability is jeopardised. Other cases may require years of surgical intervention.
Trampoline trouble
Seventy-five percent of trampoline injuries occur when multiple people are jumping on the mat.
The smallest and youngest participants are usually at greater risk for significant injury, specifically children 5 years of age or younger.
Forty-eight percent of injuries in this age group resulted in fractures or dislocations.
Loder warned: “Once you’ve seen a child with significant growth plate problems and you know they have six or eight surgeries ahead of them in the future and, even then, they’ll never truly have a normal extremity, you decide it’s time to educate.”
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