(WBEN) - The Buffalo Bills may have won in grand fashion against the Miami Dolphins 48-20 on Sunday, but they will be losing a critical piece to their defense for the rest of the season.
Late in the third quarter of Buffalo's victory over the Dolphins, veteran cornerback Tre'Davious White sustained a torn Achilles in his right foot, which caused him to be carted off the field.
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What exactly is an Achilles injury?
"An Achilles tendon is the tendon that attaches the calf muscles to the bottom of the heel. At the ankle, anytime that you have a muscle attached to the bone, it's usually attached by something called a tendon. Muscles are cells that get bigger and stronger with exercise, tendons are just the fibers that connect those muscles to the bone, and so they don't necessarily get bigger and stronger with exercise, sometimes they start to break down. When they're put under excess load, they can sometimes tear, as we often see in sports," explains Sports Medicine Physician with Excelsior Orthopedics, Dr. Jason Matuszak.
When it comes to measuring the serverness of an Achilles injury, Dr. Matuszak says it boils down to a couple of measurements.
"One is how much of the tendon is torn. If you think of that tendon being a three dimensional box of fibers, you can tear a chunk of the fibers or you can tear all of the fibers all the way across. Tearing all the fibers all the way across would be much worse than tearing just some of the fibers. So you start to think of it in terms of the amount of thickness and the amount of width and that describes for the amount of tendon injury that you have.
And then there's a measure of how far apart the two ends are. If the two ends of a tendon rip apart from each other, there's a gap that can be in between them. The best case scenario is that the two ends of a torn tendon might be very close to each other, might be even touching each other, or that they might be very far apart from each other, which you could tell is probably a worst case scenario."
You may have to wait for the tendon to rebuild, or intervene surgically, surgery being the most common scenario for elite athletes. Unfortunately, these injuries could last months, especially if you are an elite athlete, according to the doctor.
"When we're dealing with athletes with these types of injuries, it's a months- long process to try and get this to heal, it just takes that long for the body to reintegrate the tissue and to be able to get it to fortify and be strong enough to be able to put it under the loads necessary for it to be able to withstand playing sports. Somebody like yourself or myself, if we're not an NFL player, or a college football player, we might recover in weeks. We might be able to be back to doing unusual activity. In many cases, people who are not athletes might not even need a surgical repair, sometimes these things can heal on their own."