Brock Boeser had a whirlwind 2017-18 campaign. The youngster established himself as one of the top snipers in the NHL and a player the Vancouver Canucks can begin to build around as the franchise moves on the from the Sedin era.
Unfortunately, his season was cut short due to a significant back injury suffered in early March.
Boeser went into detail about what he experienced that night in a video the Canucks posted Wednesday.
“I was thinking a lot of things [when I first went down],” Boeser explained. “I hit my head too so I was seeing stars at first. At first I couldn’t really move my left leg so I was laying there on the ice and just didn’t move because I didn’t know what I hurt, if it was my pelvis, I didn’t even know it was my back at first honestly.
“And then I started to get a little panicky there laying on my stomach so I had to flip over. I didn’t know I was hurt but I had to flip over to my back or else I was going to have a panic attack. I was laying there and it just continued to hurt.
“It was the worse pain probably I’ve ever had.”
“My dad always said to me if you’re not super badly injured—I mean, I guess I was—you better get up,” Boeser continued. “So then I’m like ‘OK, I’ve laid down for too long,’ then I told [the training staff] I was ready to go to the locker room. It was pretty painful in there trying to get my gear off and cut everything off so that wasn’t fun. Then they got me on a stretcher and then they wheeled me to the ambulance and I remember hitting a few bumps and remembering how bad that hurt so I knew something was pretty badly wrong.”
The 21-year-old American added that teammates Michael Del Zotto, Chris Tanev and Troy Stecher came to visit him in the hospital where they stayed the whole night.
Boeser ended up breaking the transverse process on his L4 vertebrae but thankfully he will be able to resume his hockey career in 2018-19.
“For the next four or five days I couldn’t really walk other than to go to the bathroom, so it wasn’t too much fun but I’m just lucky it wasn’t worse than what it was,” he added.
Boeser finished second in Calder Trophy voting despite missing 20 games.
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