Former Oilers Defenseman Reveals He Nearly Died While With the Team

Now I'm in the ICU for four days. Holy moly. I got a bone and a blood infection, and they're talking about amputating my hand. They have to recut my hand open. They cut from my middle finger down to about here to end of my palm on both sides. They got to splint it well, now I can't move it, but they splint it back open, and it's just oozing pus.

And I'm on all sorts of antibiotics that they give cancer patients, like, dude, it was bad. But the team's on the road, right? The team's on the road now, and so I hadn't had a chance to even call the trainer and really explain what was up and all that kind of stuff, so I don't completely blame it on them.

But my buddy comes in one day, and he was our strength coach, and he said, how are you doing? Well, I'm in the ICU now, right? I am hooked up to all this stuff. They had to put a PIC line into my bicep and go on my heart, and they just dropped antibiotics on my heart so I didn't die, I said.

I asked a nurse what are they going to do, cut my hand off? And she goes, oh, honey, we're not even worried about that. We're worried about this getting to your heart. And at that moment, I put my head back on the pillow, and I was like, man, this is serious.

So the strength coach comes in and he says, how are you doing? I said I've been better. And he said, have you told the coaches? Or the management? Said, yeah. He says they think that you're milking an injury because you don't want to play for the Oilers again.

I said, okay. So I picked up the phone. Now, you got to understand, I'm on all these painkillers. I'm on these antibiotics. I'm sitting in the hospital, and I left Kevin Lowe and Daryl Cates, a message, a voicemail. I wasn't happy.