Illustration by Jason Raish
Snow was piled high around Ken Fleit’s Silver Spring home during the 2010 storm that came to be known as Snowmageddon. Banks of it towered on either side of his driveway. He had run out of places to put it as he shoveled hour after hour. He started flinging the stuff over his shoulders when he felt a sharp pain in his neck.
“It felt like a dagger,” Fleit said, “then an electric pain down my arm. I am sure it was from overall fatigue and a breakdown of [of my shoveling] technique.”
Turns out that a small section of disk in his neck had torn off and lodged itself on a nerve. Fleit, a 55-year-old physical therapist, underwent surgery to remove the wayward piece. He said that what happened to him shoveling is pretty unusual and could also have occurred while doing something else. But his is a cautionary tale, a reminder that shoveling snow — or shoveling anything else, for that matter — should not be approached casually.
“The analogy I like to give people is that of the weekend warrior,” said Mehul J. Desai, director of pain medicine and nonoperative spine services at George Washington University Hospital’s outpatient rehabilitation center in the District. “People go at shoveling a little too aggressively. The Washington metro area doesn’t get as much snow as up north. It’s not as common an occurrence, so people are either too exuberant [about shoveling] or avoid it until a lot of snow has piled up.”
Both can cause you pain.
About 11,500 Americans a year check into emergency rooms for injuries sustained while shoveling snow, according to a 17-year study by the Center for Injury Research and Policy at Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus, Ohio. Two-thirds of them are men. Injuries range from minor strained muscles to hits on the head with a shovel to life-threatening heart problems. (See sidebar.)
If you do feel a twinge in your back or shoulder, it could be as “innocent as a strain,” Desai said. “Injuries run the gambit, from that to a slipped disk.”
Lower backs are the most vulnerable, said David Levin, an orthopedic spine surgeon in Rockville. The muscles that span the spine and help with balance and support often are the soft tissue strained as people lift and twist shovels full of snow, Levin explained. The strain is much like a sprained ankle and heals relatively easily.
A herniated, or slipped, disk is more serious and could be caused by twisting while hoisting snow, Levin said. A damaged disk can press on a nerve, causing pain or tingling from your buttocks to your legs.
“If you have burning pain, tingling in your feet and buttocks, those could be warning signs that there are more major problems,” Desai said. “Or if you have numbness and weakness in your legs, a disk may be injured. That situation needs to be formally evaluated by a physician.”
The key to avoiding any of this, medical experts say, is to pace yourself and tackle shoveling as you would any rigorous exercise: Don’t overdo it the first time out the door. And as with any sport or exercise routine, there are best practices; in the case of shoveling, they include what to wear, how to stand, how to grip the shovel, how to move the snow and what equipment to use. These all can make a difference.
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