Injured Lions safety Saivion Smith: ‘I couldn’t move my arms or legs’
Allen Park — Saivion Smith figured that Oct. 9 would be one of the most memorable days of his life.
Turns out, that was true — just not for the reason that he thought. Smith was making his first start at safety for the Detroit Lions as they visited the New England Patriots in Week 5. On the defense’s second play from scrimmage, Smith suffered a freak injury that saw him taken out of Gillette Stadium via ambulance, strapped to a backboard.
Smith, 24, was in the Lions locker room Wednesday for the first time since his injury and detailed the experience. It wasn’t actually a concussion that caused him to lose movement of his limbs and voice for 20 seconds, he said, but rather, a bulging disc “hit my spine and caused me to luck up like that.”
“… I couldn’t move my arms and legs. It was scary. That was the scariest thing of my life. I ain’t never had anything like that happen. Even having a concussion in high school, my foot injury in college. That was the scariest thing in my life, not being able to move,” Smith said.
“That’s scary. I was stuck for like 20 seconds. I couldn’t even talk. I couldn’t get no words out. And then when they came out onto the field and were talking to me and (stuff), then I felt all right.”
Smith initially saw a concussion specialist after his injury because he had a headache, but it wasn’t until he saw another specialist that he realized the issue was with his spine.
Next up on the docket: A fusion surgery on his neck and five months of rehab. Smith said he’s “nervous as hell” about the surgery — “It’s neck surgery,” he so poignantly stated — but he feels confident that he’ll be back for minicamp and OTAs next offseason.
Although he was greatly worried about his future while lying motionless on the ground, Smith said that once he got in the ambulance, all he could think about was football.
“I’m like, ‘Damn, did that really just happen?’ I didn’t know. Then, once I got in the ambulance and could start moving again, I was really pissed off, because I was like, ‘Damn, I really want to play,’” Smith said.
Smith went undrafted out of Alabama in 2019 and was signed by Jacksonville, who waived him after the team’s final preseason game that year. After a short XFL stint, he bounced from Dallas to Seattle to Denver to San Francisco — all those teams signed him in 2021 — before he was claimed off waivers by Detroit in December of last year.
While one might think the freakish nature of Smith’s injury — you could watch the replay a thousand times and still be uncertain of how it ended with him on a stretcher — would make him nervous about a return to the game, Smith said he would strap the pads on today, if he could.
“It’s just part of football. That coulda happened any play, any time to anybody. That could’ve happened to the average Joe that works at McDonald’s if he slipped and fell, you know what I’m saying?” Smith said. “So, I feel like, it’s part of the game, it’s part of life.”
Twitter: @nolanbianchi
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