Laperriere Makes Peace With Injuries
(from CSNPhilly.com)
By Tim Panaccio
CSNPhilly.com
April 27, 2010 - Ian Laperriere sounded resigned to his fate.
That's never an easy thing for a hockey player, who aptly fits the description of an ultimate "playoff warrior."
"You work all year to get to this point of the year ... I'm very disappointed, but what can you do?" Laperriere said on a conference call Tuesday night. "All the doctors say the same thing. I need some rest to get my injury to heal."
Laperriere is out indefinitely – essentially, until next season – with a concussion and brain contusion, the result of taking a puck in the face in Game 5 of the Eastern Conference quarterfinals last week.
The Flyers' most courageous forward threw his body – specifically, his face – in front of New Jersey's Paul Martin's slap shot from the blue line during a penalty kill. Martin's shot hit Laperriere above the right eye, necessitating close to 70 stitches to close the wound.
The larger damage wasn't diagnosed until this week after two CT scans.
"I feel fine – I've had concussions in the past," he said, adding that when neurologists did a CT scan of his eye socket they discovered the spot on his brain. "They saw something that they didn't like. They didn't want to take any chances. I went back to get another CT scan that was more precise on my brain and they found something that wasn't supposed to be there.
"It wasn't a big shock because that first CT scan told us what was going on. Just more like relief in we know what is going on up there ... I got a bruise in the front of my brain."
If Laperriere continued to play and was hit in the same area again it could cause a cerebral hemorrhage. That could be fatal.
"They don't want any bleeding in [my brain]. If you start bleeding in your brain it's not good," he said. "We're hockey players and take pride in playing through injuries, but that's one thing I just can't afford to do for the sake of my family. Trust me, I want to be out there. I'm mad about that."
Laperriere said his sight isn't blurred but it's not perfect, either.
He still remembers the shot, too.
"The guy kinda wind up and I went down and for whatever reason, for the first time in my career, he tried to go across me [with the shot]," Laperriere recalled.
"If he goes to the net or close to the net, he's going to hit my shin pad. But if you look at the replay, which I did, he tried to go across in the air and he hit my face..."
Laperriere said it would take "a little miracle" for him to return this season. More than that, it would take the Flyers going to the Stanley Cup Final. And even then, that might not be enough time.
"The way the doctors were talking to me today and yesterday, there's not too much chance it will heal that quick," he said.
Laperriere just became this year's "poster player" for wearing a face shield.
"I will come back next year with a shield. I don't feel I have anything to prove toughness-wise. I fought enough in my career. I'll fight again ... It's sad that it took an incident like that to make me realize that my eyes were that important.
"The five, 10 minutes of not seeing anything out of that eye and panicking and [trainer Jim McCrossin] telling me my eye was still there, you have so many bad feelings going through your mind that I don't want to [go through] that or my family, ever again."
E-mail Tim Panaccio at tpanotch@comcast.net