OUR TEAM, the Russell Rams, had just obliterated the number one team, Portage La Prairie, in the final at a tournament in Minnedosa, Manitoba. Portage could not believe it—how did this shitty little team of 12- and 13-year-olds from Russell beat them? After all, Portage was a town of 13,000, while Russell was only a tenth the size. They were convinced it was a fluke. So they invited us to a two-day, two-game tournament a couple of weeks later. The first game was held on March 21, 1982. There were eleven seconds left in the second period, and we were coming out of our zone when our defenceman Greg Slywchuck, the same buddy I had been playing with since the first day I laced up, went around the net to break out the puck. I skated up the ice too fast, landing at the blue line far ahead of the play. Because I was not in a good position, I had to turn back to pick up the puck, and when I did, their defender, who had been rushing my way, suddenly tripped and rocketed down the ice toward me on his butt. His skate came straight up and caught me under the right arm.
There was a collective gasp from the crowd, but I had no idea what was going on. I could feel something warm spreading under my bicep, so I dropped my left glove and cupped the top of my arm in my hand to have a look. There was a huge cut. I could see muscle—it looked like raw meat. Suddenly, it was like somebody had turned a sprayer nozzle on. Blood spurted out a good foot across the ice. My feet pushed through quicksand as I made my way over to the bench, and Coach Fowler ripped my jersey off me. His wife, Buella, appeared from nowhere, balled up her scarf and stuffed it into my arm. Coach wound a tourniquet tight below by bicep, and one of the mom’s friends, Mrs. Petz, squeezed my arm tight.
Coach lifted me up in his arms like a baby and ran out to his car. He and Mrs. Petz and her son, my teammate Ted, loaded me into a car and, pedal to the metal, raced all the way to Portage District General. The tourniquet and pressure had stopped the bleeding, so the emergency room staff took care of a baby who had been badly burned first.
How do you grasp a situation like that when you’re 12 years old? All I was thinking was, “Okay, I’ll get stitched up and hopefully I won’t miss the third period.”
Finally, after about twenty minutes, the doctor came out and the first thing he did was place two fingers on my wrist to take my pulse. This weird look came over his face, and I heard him make a little choking sound. He said, “You need to go to Winnipeg to the Children’s Hospital. Now.” There was no pulse. My brachial artery had been severed. I was bleeding to death.
Coach went back to the rink, while Mrs. Petz stayed with me on the trip to Winnipeg. I told Mrs. Petz I knew I wouldn’t make it back to the rink in time for the end of the first game, but hoped that if we hurried I could be there for the second. Portage La Prairie is located near the junction of Highways 1 and 16 (the Yellowhead) in south central Manitoba, about fifty miles west of Winnipeg. Cars and roads were not as good as they are now, and there was a lot of snow and ice so we slipped around a bit, but she made it in two hours.
Thankfully, a lot of farm kids go to the Children’s Hospital in Winnipeg. Farm kids mean farm accidents. Twenty per cent of these accidents are related to farm machinery—tractor rollovers, or hands, hair and clothing caught in moving machinery. It was rare to shake hands with a farmer who had all ten fingers.
Dr. Robertson had reattached his share of limbs and digits, so although they didn’t have much time to figure out what to do, they came up with a brilliant plan. They extended the original cut from two to nine inches, folded back the skin and did what is called a venous graft. Along with the artery, the radial nerve had been cut. The path of that nerve moves down from the upper arm to the thumb, the index finger and the side of the middle finger. The ulnar nerve has a couple of pathways into the fingers. So they cut a portion of the ulnar in my wrist and attached that section of nerve to the severed part of the radial nerve. They wanted the nerve to grow back down my arm so that I would get back the feeling in my lower arm and index and middle fingers. It was six hours of surgery under a microscope. I was left-handed, but before the accident, I played sports with my right hand. After the operation, I became ambidextrous when playing sports. To this day I can flip the Ping Pong paddle back and forth between my right and left hand during a game.
Once a month for an entire year, I would visit Dr. Robertson in Winnipeg. He’d come into the room and shove a two-and-a-half-inch needle into the soft pad on the palm of my hand, in between my index finger and thumb. This was done without any anesthetic. Every time Dr. Robertson went to jab me, I would squeeze my eyes shut and pray to God to make it not hurt. The needle was attached to an electromyogram, or EMG machine. It produced a graph of the electrical activity in the muscle and measured nerve growth. The needle was like an antenna to detect the electrical voltage changes occurring on the surface of individual muscle cells. Next, Dr. Robertson would pick and prod at my arm with a pin, asking, “Can you feel that? Can you feel this?” As much as I hated that needle, the real pain came each time I’d ask, “So is it okay to play hockey now?” Dr. Robertson would shake his head sadly and say simply, “No.”
There is a line in a John Cleese movie where he says, “It’s not the despair. I can handle the despair. It’s the hope!” That totally sums up my feelings at the time. I would be so excited on the way to Winnipeg Children’s Hospital that I’d be bouncing up and down in the seat. Each time, I figured I’d get the go-ahead to play hockey again. The adults kept me out of the loop. They knew it was going to take a year at least, but they wouldn’t tell me. Was I any better? How was it progressing? They were trying to protect me from disappointment, but it had the opposite effect. At the end of each visit, I’d hold off crying until I got into the car. Then I’d crack the window, letting the freezing wind bite into my face as I quietly sobbed for the next five hours all the way home.
I missed a whole year of hockey. My lifeline, my sanctuary was gone. I couldn’t play baseball or any contact sports at all. The nerve had to regrow all the way back down to my wrist. Progress was slow—a millimetre a day—and delicate. Any sort of trauma and I could lose function in my hand permanently. My arm was taped up to my chest in a bent position for six weeks. A local physiotherapist helped me rehab it. No matter how hard she reefed on it, it wouldn’t go straight.
As I said earlier, my mom was terrified that exactly this kind of thing would happen, so she never came to any of my games. But there is a school of thought that if you put that energy out there, it is going to happen. To this day, I wonder about that.