Hockey shouldn't be a life-or-death proposition and in the vast majority of cases it isn't. William Wallen is the exception.
Hockey shouldn't be a life-or-death proposition and in the vast majority of cases it isn't. William Wallen is the exception. If it weren't for hockey, he wouldn't be alive today.
Okay, I know what you're thinking: Smacks of over-statement, right? Fact is, though, if Wallen wasn't on the roster of the Mississauga St. Michael's Majors for the home opener at the Hershey Centre in September, if he wasn't heading into the dressing room after the home side's 3-1 victory over Niagara, and if he hadn't gone to the trainer's room before he had even taken his skates off, the Majors would be wearing black armbands and the Swedish import's promising hockey career would have been snuffed out.
The sequence of events as William tells it: "It was the last minute of the game. I was on the bench. Maybe 30 seconds to go. Our team doctor was standing behind me. I asked him for an aspirin, told him about my headache. Before he could find one, the game ended and I skated out on the ice with the rest of the team. But right after I went to the trainer's room. The headache was much worse. I threw up. They decided that I should go to hospital."
He wasn't diagnosed on site, but that's to be expected. Could have been a concussion. Could have been flu. Could have been an infection, or an allergic reaction. No knowing at the time. But the fact that the Majors' medical staff called for an ambulance saved William Wallen's life. No over-statement there.
Wallen had an aneurysm. Not diagnosed at the arena or, as he likes to point out, by the ambulance crew.
"They didn't think it was an emergency so they were stopping at red lights on the way to the hospital," he says now.
Wallen wasn't out of the woods when he got to the hospital.
That Wallen suffered an aneurysm literally sitting in front of a doctor was only the first long shot but not the longest. He would have been rushed into surgery immediately upon being diagnosed at the hospital but inexplicably the bleeding in his brain stopped. Surgeons were able to wait 48 hours and assess his condition. They were able to brief his mother, who had arrived from Sweden a few days before the start of the season, and his father, who hopped on the first available flight out of Stockholm.
Wallen's prospects at that point weren't promising for life, never mind hockey. After that first surgery it wasn't clear if he'd be able to walk or talk. Ten days later he had another surgery.
"They didn't tell me about the risks until after because really there were no options," he said. "I had to have it. But afterwards they told me that it was about 50-50 that I'd make it."
Coming out of the second surgery the prognosis couldn't have been better.
"They told me that I should make a complete recovery," he said, "including hockey."
That William Wallen survived is a small miracle. Having the sudden onset of a life-threatening condition in the presence of a medical staff just minutes away from a hospital equipped to treat him, well as Majors' coach Dave Cameron says, William could have been almost anywhere else and the outcome could have and almost certainly would have been tragic.
"Afterwards you think of it and realize that if we had been on the bus for a road trip up to Sudbury or the Soo, hours from any facility that could help him, it could have cost William his life," Cameron said. "It really came down to the matter of minutes. Even if he had been at his billets' home or if he had been somewhere away from the arena with a team-mate, he might not have been rushed to the hospital."
That William Wallen is back in Mississauga's lineup might not be a larger miracle, but it's the longest of long shots. Not what his coach expected even when he received the good news after the second surgery.
"Our original thought was to hold William out of the lineup for the season and to look to next season," Cameron says. "But we were told that after three months he would be able to start skating again and that he'd be able to eventually return to play with no real physical risk to William."
Three months of rest passed for an increasingly restless teenager. He had gone home to Sweden - "a time when I really didn't feel like part of the team any more," he said. But that feeling changed when he returned to Mississauga in December to put in a month of conditioning and skating. At first he was on his own, but eventually joined his teammates -- sometimes when the coaches' heads were turned. "He'd skate on his own and we'd tell him to get off the ice before the team came on, but every once and a while he'd sneak back on the ice during practices and we'd have to chase him away," Cameron said.
First it was contact in practice. The last step was getting back on the ice in the heat of battle.
I saw Wallen the other day in Windsor. He's on the small side, one of your waterbug-variety forwards, but clearly a skilled kid and feisty. I'd say "gutsy" but I guess at this point that goes without saying. Let's just say that he's not shy of contact and he's bold with the puck. A NHL scout, a guy who hands out single roses when bouquets are in order, told me that he's "a good player … a prospect."
He's still a work in progress. "When we have three games in a weekend, my legs aren't there for the third game," Wallen said. "My condition is not there. But it will come."
No doubt he will get a little tired of talking about his brush with death. I suspect he might already feel that way. "I don't think my life has changed that much," he said. "You can't go around thinking about it all the time."
No doubt that he'd rather talk about his decision to leave Djurgarden to come to the CHL: "It's the best junior competition, much faster and harder than in Sweden, many more games." Or about his hopes for the season: "I think we play hard and can have a good playoffs."
(I didn't want to push him to update his blog. Like he doesn't have enough on his plate.)
The Majors staggered out of the blocks this season but rounded into some decent form in mid-season. Cameron isn't sure what effect William's scare had on his team-mates - maybe because it had shaken him up as well. But the coach does think his team has been boosted on the ice and off by William's return. The Majors don't look like a threat to the OHL's elite - Windsor and London in the West, Brampton and Belleville in the East - but if the playoffs started today the current Mississauga team would meet the team formerly known as Mississauga: the Niagara Ice Dogs. An intriguing series and for MSMM a winnable one.
During surgery William Wallen had a coil implanted in his brain. I asked him if surgeons showed him the type of coil they used. "No, and I don't want to see it," he said.
Dave Cameron could get one of those coils and then ask William to leave the dressing room while his teammates passed it around to get a good, hard look at. Not that the game's life or death, just that anything's possible.
Ten quick thoughts about last week's tilt in London with the Spitfires coming out with a 4-3 win and with John Tavares being sidelined with a shoulder injury:
1. The play that Tavares was injured on looked eerily similar to the play in the CHL Prospects' Game when he injured his other shoulder. Both times he was skating down the right side and was angled by a defenceman away from the net. Exact same place. The difference: Prospects' Game it was a four-way collision (Matt Duchene, Taylor Doherty and Zach Kassian being the other drivers) against the boards, but there was only one other vehicle in London, namely Taylor Hall.
2. The last time a prospective No. 1 overall dished out a hit like that against another celebrity teen: Crosby on Ovechkin 2005 WJC.
3. Somebody said it was Downie-on-McAmmond Redux. I thought Hall on Tavares was a clean hit. Tavares did get his head down looking for the puck.
4. London will be in straits if the Knights do not get better goaltending than Trevor Cann gave them, especially on Andrei Loktionov's game winner. It wasn't just that he has to make that stop. Fact is, it would have been hard not to make it.
5. L.A. did well to get Loktionov in the fifth round. There are better prospects in junior hockey and you could start with his own team, but I'm struggling to think of a drafted forward who's more entertaining.
6. A lot of attention goes to Hall, Loktionov and Ryan Ellis, but I think people under-estimate Windsor's size having an impact on games. It did look like different age groups out there. I'm sure that other team's don't look forward to the physical beatdown.
7. It was a loss, so the flowers are wilted, but still Nazim Kadri was great.
8. Ben Shutron knocking Kadri out of the game for a few shifts showed his value to the team and sent a message for games and probably a playoff series down the line.
9. These are two well-coached outfits.
10. Why the (insert your four-letter word here) there has to be not just a fight on the opening faceoff but a second one a couple of seconds in is beyond me. It didn't take anything away from the game, but only because the game was too good. Completely unnecessary. The idea that fighting can be justified as spontaneous stuff within the context of play goes out the window. The Knights could have printed tickets: "Game starts at 7:30, fights at 7:30:01."
