On Family, Hockey and Healing by Walter Gretzky

Author:Walter Gretzky [Gretzky, Walter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-36937-6
Publisher: Random House of Canada
Published: 2002-10-14T16:00:00+00:00

Of course, I was unconscious and oblivious to all this. It’s only now I can say how much I and my family appreciated it. Most of the expressions of concern were positive and helped my family feel supported at a very difficult time. There was just one unfortunate incident: a Toronto radio station actually announced that I had died. I don’t know how this rumour got started, but as you can imagine, it infuriated those closest to me, because in the midst of worrying about me and trying to cope, they had to scramble to assure everyone that I was not dead! Our good friend Ron Finucan from the CNIB recalls that he was driving in his car, listening to the radio, when he heard the report and went into shock. He’d just seen me at the hospital, and although I was in rough shape, I was definitely still among the living! He and many others spent a few hours under the impression that they’d soon be at my funeral, before the confusion and distress were cleared up.

Meanwhile, there was nothing the doctors could do, because of spasming in the blood vessels in my brain. It was a Wednesday when it all began. They couldn’t operate until the spasms stopped. On Saturday they did another angiogram, and within an hour of determining that the spasms had ceased, they did the surgery, which took five hours. Then they had to pretty much just wait and see how I would do. When Dr. de Villiers came out and spoke to my family, he said, up front, that I had had a brush with death. He said they actually found scar tissue, and that it was possible I’d had a previous bleed in my brain and didn’t know it.

The kind of stroke I had is called a subarachnoid hemorrhage, which means there’s bleeding on the surface of the brain, between the brain and the skull. This kind of hemorrhage is usually caused by an aneurysm, which is a weak spot on a blood vessel—probably something you are born with—and when it breaks, it causes a hemorrhage, and that in turn injures brain cells. Of course, that was only the beginning of my stroke-related problems. Along with the surgery done on me to repair the burst blood vessel, which, in the end, saved my life, I also had to have a permanent shunt inserted to drain fluid from my brain. You can see the tube under the skin on my neck, but it doesn’t bother me.

When I finally did wake up in the ICU after all the surgery, surrounded by my family, I was utterly, profoundly disoriented— “completely out of it,” as Glen would say. It must have been a difficult sight for my loved ones. I was hooked up to a tangle of tubes and machines. My hands were bound up in so much gauze it looked like I was wearing boxing gloves. My arms were tied down so that I wouldn’t grab at the staples on the shaven side of my head.

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