“I wanted to bleed, because now I finally could.”
After being cleared for contact in June, Pittsburgh Penguins forward Pascal Dupuis isn’t taking anything for granted as he makes his return to the rink.
Least of all, the hits. In fact, he’s craving them.
“In June, after the doctors ran me through a battery of final tests and cleared me to return to the ice to skate with other players, my first thought was: Man, I can’t wait to take a really good shot. A nice stick to the ribs. Maybe even a puck to the face,” Dupuis wrote in The Players’ Tribune Monday.
The 36-year-old was forced to miss the majority of the 2014-15 season due to blood clots. He first wrote about that health scare in an article in The Players’ Tribune in February.
Now, in his second article for the website, titled Why I’m Coming Back, Dupuis shares what he’s gone through during his leave from hockey — from counting spinach leaves and sticking to an extremely strict diet, to the emotional side effects of missing hockey — complete with intimate details of exactly why he’s coming back, and the measures he’s taking to ensure he stays healthy.
Here are some excerpts:
On taking control of his health:
It turns out that blood is a tricky thing. When you have a knee injury, your rehab is basically all about your ability to handle physical pain. With a blood clot, the pain is mental. What’s tested is your patience. When the clot was found, I was immediately put on the blood-thinner Coumadin. The weird thing with the medicine is that Vitamin K reverses its effects. So basically everything that you’re told is good for you — such as kale, broccoli, spinach or really anything green — you can eat it, but you have to eat the exact same portion every time. So I’m literally going through the salad bag like, ‘one leaf, two leaf, three leaf, four leaf.’
On being coached by his kids:
One of my favorite things when I was playing was having my son come down from his room in the morning and bust my balls about stuff. My kids can usually only watch the first period and then it’s time for bed, so they watch the highlights on their computer the next morning. My son will come down and start chirping me. “Hey Dad, Kunitz was wide open! How come you didn’t pass it to him? Come on!” … When my kids would come down for breakfast while I was dealing with the blood clots, I would get a little kick in the chest. It might sound silly, but it’s kind of this feeling, like, ‘Do they know their dad’s still on the team?’
On putting his story out there:
It’s pretty simple. You just have to be organized and stay on top of it, but compared to the monstrous whiteboard that my wife uses to tracks our four kids’ schedules, I really can’t complain. In fact, that’s why I wanted to put my story out there. I don’t want anybody to feel sorry for me or think that I’m playing with a handicap. When I’m out there on the ice, I’ll be 100 percent. I’ll be the same straight-line player. If you see me out there stick-handling and trying to be cute, there’s something a lot more wrong with me than my blood.
On the bittersweet go-ahead to play:
I can understand why some people think I should walk away. When I got cleared for contact, I think it was a little bittersweet for my wife. She asked me, “If you feel another clot, what’s going to stop you from hiding it again?”
On what’s pulling him back to the ice:
My ultimate goal has never changed. It’s the thing that I was thinking about when I went into the tube for the CT scan last year. The thing I was thinking about when I was counting out spinach leaves this spring. It was going through my mind as I pushed a 400-pound sled up and down the turf this summer. And it was the only thing that got me through the uncertainty and the injections and all of the medical jargon. That thing is the Stanley Cup. Not just lifting it, but the thought of bringing it home to my family and looking at my kids and my wife and saying, “See? We did it.”
