March 22nd, 1989.
I'll never forget the date. I suffered one of the most horrific injuries in all professional sports.
We were playing in St. Louis. It was the first period and I caught an errant skate on my neck. It severed my jugular vein, and I almost bled out.
I knew I was in trouble. In fact, I thought I only had a couple of minutes to live. I’ve got to get off the ice; my mom's watching the game on TV back in Canada.
Ten days and three hundred stitches later I returned to the ice.
I was unaware of what trauma does to us. I thought I could just go on like nothing ever happened, because that’s who I was: the Cowboy Goalie, the tough guy. I thought I could handle anything that came my way now. Not quite, it turned out.
The following season was where I really started to struggle. I had depression through my life, OCD symptoms, anxiety, but now it was beyond anything that I’d ever experienced. I could hardly leave the house. I was drinking to get through the day.
I just wanted the mental torment to stop. My wife, Joanie, had left me the night before, staying at a hotel because I had been on another bender and just impossible to deal with.
I basically stayed up all night and into the next day, just drinking and feeling like my mind was spinning right out of my head. A rifle was nearby.
When she showed up to check on me, I just grabbed the gun and pulled the trigger.
I didn’t know if it had any bullets in it.
Paramedics and police came. I was still conscious. I said, "Don’t tell them I shot myself. I will lose my job as a professional hockey coach." She told them it was an accident. In the hospital, the police said, we don’t believe you. They told Joanie that if they change the report to suicide, she will have control of how I was treated. So, she changed the report.
I had a six-month stint in a rehabilitation facility. Went to treatment, lots of therapy. Twenty years of undiagnosed PTSD after the jugular cut as a goalie.
The biggest lesson though was had the gun not been right there, I wouldn’t have done it.
I actually didn’t think there was a bullet. I was going to just “show her” how much I was struggling. Had I not had access, I probably wouldn’t have attempted suicide at that moment.
Today, I still have several firearms in a safe in the tack room outside. My biggest thing is accessibility. We keep them locked up. Joanie would take the keys away if she saw me spiraling.
I don’t look at it like, I’m cured, everything's all fine now. I’m going to continue to struggle and battle. But I feel great today. I feel I’ve come a long way as a person. And I’m so very lucky to have Joanie. She’s the love of my life.