Padres beat writer Corey Brock added some quotes from Cory Luebke to his original article late last night. From Luebke's perspective he knew all along that something just didn't feel right. I suspect when you're recovering from an injury for the first time, you're looking to experts and other patients to tell you if what you're experiencing is normal. Though it seems that even with all their expertise and advise, a patient usually has an innate sense of their body's condition.
Padres left-hander Cory Luebke to miss second straight season with elbow injury | padres.com: News
"I guess the general consensus was the graft never took and that there were some problems from the get-go," Luebke said. "Kind of the way the process has gone … the stops and starts, and every time we turned up the volume and intensity, it was never too long before we had a setback. That sort of let me know there's something going on.
"My gut feeling through the rehab process was this didn't seem right. And when we did the MRI, it was pretty clear what was going on."
Obviously I'm no doctor, but I would have thought that doctors could or would take a post surgery MRI to somehow see if the repair had taken. Luebke visited an orthopedic surgeon in September but I guess we can surmise that no definitive conclusion could be made. GM Josh Byrnes has said in multiple radio interviews that every patient has a unique recovery time and while that's true, you'd think that with all of these setbacks and red flags that this decision for a second surgery could have been made earlier. I guess there's no point in second guessing experts though.
Brock also tells us that Luebke's original doctor who performed his first surgery passed away last year, so he'll be seeing another renowned surgeon in the near future. Once Luebke's medical file is passed along they'll schedule his next surgery.
