Gabriel Landeskog has a message for young hockey players everywhere:
“You only have one brain. If you don’t take care of it, you can really suffer the consequences for a long time.”
Early in his first campaign as captain of the Colorado Avalanche, Landeskog suffered a concussion after being on the receiving end of a Joe Thornton hit. He missed 11 games of the lockout-shortened 2012-13 season during his difficult recovery, and learned many valuable lessons throughout.
Now, he wants to pass those lessons on to other athletes.
“I was lucky to have some of the best trainers and specialists in the country taking care of me, but imagine a youth hockey player in Manitoba or Florida with the same symptoms — imagine how lost they would feel,” he wrote in an article in The Players’ Tribune. “The reason I am writing this article is not to dwell on the dangers of playing hockey. In fact, quite the opposite. I want kids and parents to understand the complexity of postconcussion syndrome while also understanding that if you take the injury seriously and allow yourself the proper time to heal, you can overcome it.”
In the article, Landeskog describes the physical and emotional symptoms he felt, as well as the pressure he put on himself to “put on a brave face” and get back to the game to help out his teammates. And while he says the culture around concussions is changing in the sporting world, there’s still a ways to go when it comes to the negative stigma of associating head injuries and other “invisible” injuries with weakness.
“If you’re feeling foggy, or sitting in a dark room wondering what’s wrong with you, go see a doctor immediately. Take as much time as you need to recover,” he wrote.
“If anyone tells you that’s a sign of weakness, you can tell them that Gabe Landeskog is weak, too.”
Here are some excerpts from the article:
On what a concussion feels like, physically…
“…when I woke up at the hotel the next morning, my head was throbbing. It felt like two cement blocks were pushing against the sides of my skull. I remember my alarm kept going off, and the sound was just killing me. When I looked down at my phone to call our trainer, the brightness was so excruciating that I had to turn away.”
…and mentally:
“Having a concussion is physically painful, but the mental anguish it causes creates an even more dangerous cycle. You don’t know how to articulate the pain you’re feeling and make people understand, and you also don’t want to let them down. It feels like you’re trapped in your own little bubble, and you don’t know how to deal with it.”
On the support of his teammates during his 2013 recovery:
“Already, a cultural change is taking place in NHL locker rooms. So many of my teammates came up to me and said, ‘Hey, you need to have patience with this stuff. Take your time coming back. We need you fully healthy.’
I can’t stress enough how important that was to me. If even one teammate had said something like, ‘Man, we really need you back. You’re putting us in a tough spot,’ I don’t know if I would’ve had the patience to fully recover.”
On redefining toughness:
“Unlike broken bones, concussions are invisible, and that means that everyone in the hockey community needs to unite and redefine what we mean by toughness and warrior mentality. If we continue to keep quiet, it’s sending the message that taking time to recover is not right, or that it’s a sign of weakness. We have to stand up and speak up.”
Read the article in its entirety here.
