Gotta be honest, I totally forgot that Cam Atkinson still played for the Flyers. He was one of the guys put on the shelf early this season, a crowded shelf that also included Ryan Ellis, Sean Couturier, and Bobby Brink.

Atkinson did his year-ending presser on Friday and offered this nugget:

Those are paraphrased notes in Twitter form obviously, so I went back and transcribed the soundbite and it reads like this, verbatim:

“I wasn’t feeling well at the start of training camp and got a couple of different MRIs, couple of different misdiagnosis (sic), Finally saw someone who told me I had a herniated disc in my c6, c7 (vertebrae) and that I needed to get surgery right away. So at the time, I really didn’t want to get surgery because it kind of freaked me out a bit going through the neck, and I was being told differently. But obviously I went through the process of trying to rehab naturally and went back to Columbus for a little bit to see some people that I trust and I know. Came back here feeling pretty good, thought that I could return to play in December when we went on that road trip. Just the process of the return to play, I couldn’t get through a practice by myself. I felt like I needed to do something and saw a different doctor, (Alexander Vaccaro), who is a BC guy, Boston College guy and one of the Eagles’ surgeons who has worked on a lot of professional athletes and pretty much reassured me that if I don’t take care of my (muscle atrophy in the triceps), that I probably wouldn’t be able to play again. So I got surgery and woke up three days later and felt unbelievable. All the pain and couldn’t sleep, and it was gone.”

There’s more but that’s the relevant part, and what a quote it is.

First, he mentions that he was misdiagnosed. I put the (sic) in there because he used the singular term but meant plural, so on more than one occasion was his injury misdiagnosed. That’s one red flag.


The second red flag is when he talks about going back to Columbus “to see some people that I trust and I know.” It’s one thing to get a second or third opinion, but within the context of the quote, it’s suggestive and alludes to a distrust of Flyers doctors.

Third, he says an Eagles doc straightened things out. Alexander Vaccaro is the Birds’ “Team Spine Consultant” and has a blurb on the website:

“Dr. Vaccaro has served as the president of the Rothman Institute since 2014, and is the Richard H. Rothman Professor and Chairman in the Department of Orthopaedic Surgery, and Professor of Neurosurgery at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He is the President-elect of Cervical Spine Research Society (CSRS), 2019. Dr. Vaccaro also serves as Co-Director of the Regional Spinal Cord Injury Center of the Delaware Valley and Co-Director of Spine Surgery and the Spine Fellowship program at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital.”

So this isn’t to shit on the Flyers doctors, because only they and Atkinson know what the process looked like behind the scenes, but from an optics perspective it definitely feels like an L. The player is sitting up there at a press conference talking about “trust” and telling everyone that an Eagles doctor ultimately figured it out. There’s only one takeaway after hearing/reading that quote.