Deion Sanders to undergo emergency blood clot surgery
Deion Sanders will undergo surgery on Friday morning to remove a pair of blood clots, one in each leg, in an effort to increase blood flow and allow doctors to proceed with another surgery in the future to address the coach's hammertoes.
“You’ve heard it from everybody else but you hadn’t heard it from me. Here we go: Met with my doctors a week ago. Got hammertoe, two toes out of the three are hammer toes and they wanted to straighten those out.
"But I am not receiving enough blood flow in order to do that surgery and another surgery to fix the dislocation of the foot as well. So, this is where we are now: There’s no talk of amputation, there’s no talk of any of that whatsoever. The doctors were just telling me, worse comes to worse, this was going to happen. But I believe in staying right so we never have to take that left."
The coach then explained that the blood clots he has are the thing standing in the way of his dealing with the hammertoes.
“Now, this is what happened: I went to the doctors the other day to check myself out. And I have two clots in my leg. One in my right leg, one in my left leg, which is my thighs. So now I’m having a procedure tomorrow to try to get those clots so now I can have proper blood flow through the leg so they can fix the toes,” Sanders said. “That’s what’s going on. That is it. You heard it from me. That’s what’s going on.”
A hammertoe is a condition where the joint in a toe points upward instead of staying flat and arises when the muscles in a foot or leg are weakened and the tendons in the toe pull in an abnormal way.
Sanders has dealt with blood clot issues for a few years, and had to have two of his toes amputated when he was head coach at Jackson State, forcing him to miss some games on the sideline during the 2021 football season. He needed to use a motorized wheelchair to get around after complications from that surgery.
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