Seventeen year-old McKenzie Neufeld of Outlook laced up his skates, slid on his gear, grabbed his stick and hit the ice at the Jim Kook Rec Plex on Friday, February 16, joining his fellow peers for an afternoon of hockey.
That statement may not sound spectacular by itself, but it may actually speak volumes about the human spirit and the willingness to push oneself to achieving something that may look impossible.
That’s because McKenzie could’ve easily been paralyzed and living in a wheelchair after a catastrophic incident out on the ice that took place last spring.
On April 30, Neufeld was playing at a Kindersley Klippers spring camp that he was invited to after he had finished up his regular hockey season. In the third period of the game, he was checked hard from behind by another player, sending him colliding head-first into the boards.
To his credit, Neufeld skated off the ice under his own power, which didn’t send off any alarms to those in attendance, but after he complained of pain from the base of his head and neck, the trainers immediately called 911 and whisked him to the hospital in Kindersley. Soon, McKenzie was transported to Royal University Hospital in Saskatoon, where he and his family learned what had taken place as a result of the hit from behind.
His C1 vertebrae was fractured in three places, with an MRI revealing that the ligament where his C1 and C2 vertebrae connect had been pulled away to one side. The C1 and C2 vertebrae are what connect the head to the spine, and also control the movement of the head.
What followed next was precisely what young athletes such as Neufeld don’t want to endure; spending four months in a halo brace in order to keep his neck immobile, meaning he had to surrender a spring and summer full of his other favourite sports and pastimes such as baseball, golfing, fishing and kayaking.
At the start of Neufeld’s Grade 12 year at Outlook High School, the halo came off but it was discovered that his neck was still unstable, so he underwent a surgery on November 8 that saw his neck fused with four screws and two rods. The procedure left him with limited head movement possible for the rest of his life.
It’s unknown whether the player who hit McKenzie is even aware of the impact he made in that fateful game last April.
Fast forward to last Friday afternoon, and the young player was all smiles as he took to the ice and played the game of hockey for the first time since the hit that changed his future last spring.
It was a day that some may have thought would never come, particularly medical experts who told Neufeld and his family that he would never play contact sports again.
As it turns out, sometimes the medical experts can be wrong.
“It’s a pretty emotional day,” said McKenzie’s mother Hope, her eyes tearing up as she watched her son on the ice. “I knew this day would come, but it was just a matter of time. He has so much drive and passion for this game that I knew he would work as hard as he had to in order to play in this game today.”
Neufeld said he felt pretty good after playing, managing to work out some of the kinks and find some of his groove again on the ice.
“It feels really good because it’s been like ten months, so I’ve really been looking forward to it,” he said. “In the first game, I found that I was struggling out there, but once you get warmed up, it feels better.”
The young athlete says he’s been able to get on the ice playing shinny in recent times, and while playing in an actual game brought a bit of a mental hurdle, he was able to push that aside to focus on the action.
“I’ve been skating in shinny for a couple of months, so I’ve got that down pat,” said McKenzie. “But you get other bodies out there and that many of them, and you might hesitate a little bit, but I got around that pretty quick.”
Neufeld undergoes physiotherapy up in Saskatoon, sticking to a consistent schedule of it in order to help his body move forward in regaining some of what was lost after the hit.
“They’re working on his physical and mental aspects when it comes to the injury,” said Hope. “He has to go up there every two weeks for two months straight just to wake up all the muscles in his neck and back because they’ve been sitting immobile for eight months.”
One of McKenzie’s first goals he set for himself post-injury was being able to play in this particular game; the school’s annual Telemiracle match that pitted students against teachers out on the ice. So aside from having to work physically hard to reach his goal, where exactly did he get permission from to lace up the skates again?
“First, from his mother,” said Hope, with an all-too-familiar motherly grin. “Second, from his physiotherapist. When they asked if he had any goals, he said he wanted to play in the Telemiracle game. So they worked really hard at giving him enough neck movement to have the confidence to be out there.”
“My mom said, ‘You know what? Whatever; if you wanna do it, then go for it’,” said McKenzie. “Physio’s been going good so far. I’ve been doing it for six weeks now, so I’ve got a couple more sessions and I should be back to doing whatever I want.”
When McKenzie had his neck surgery in November, Hope wrote about her son’s condition and posted it on Facebook to notify friends and family members. After her post was made public, the issue of hits from behind in hockey grabbed major attention.
“I got so much feedback from people right across Canada; BC, Alberta, Ontario, Newfoundland, Labrador, New Brunswick,” she said. “There were even people from Wisconsin, Minnesota, and North Carolina that were commenting on it. I don’t think it’s ever going to change Hockey Canada’s eyes, and right now in the Saskatchewan Hockey Association, it’s not mandatory to have a stop sign on any jersey in this province. In the states, they’re trying a few different ways to figure out how to stop it, but I think the first thing to do is allow kids to hit from behind at an earlier age so that they know how to give a hit and absorb a hit. That way, when they get to the older age groups and there’s a bit of a girth difference between kids, then they know how to do it.”
Hope says that with her son’s highly-athletic background, he obviously wants to work toward playing other sports again in the future, and she says it’s difficult for an athlete to have what they love to do taken away from their everyday lives.
“He’s really going to work hard because he wants to play ball,” she said. “Because hockey season is over, he’s going to try and see if he can play ball this year, but again, it’ll be under the watchful eye of his physiotherapist. We’ve got him playing catch a bit just to wake up those ball muscles and we’ll see where we go, but it’s really hard to take sports out of an athletic kid.”
With the past ten months being an incredibly trying time for their family, Hope says she recognizes that things could’ve turned out far worse for her son. Luckily, life seems to be providing some clear silver linings and shedding some more light in what could’ve been a much darker situation.
“It’s been a tough haul; I mean, four months in a halo where I had to clean his screws twice a day, and we had to sponge-bath him every two days,” she said. “That’s a very humbling feeling for a child, but Mack has taken it in stride. He appreciates the fact that he actually should be paralyzed, and how he’s not is a miracle by itself. He has the biggest smile on his face and he loves being out there and sharing his passion of the game with kids of all ages. To have him out here, we are truly watching an absolute miracle today.”
Right now, McKenzie is getting some interesting work experience through the school as he interns with the Saskatoon Blades hockey club, staying connected to the game he loves and making him think of perhaps a career in coaching for his future.
As for his return to the ice in Outlook, Neufeld not only competed in two hockey games that afternoon, but he also scored the first goal within minutes of the action starting.
“That was a good feeling, knowing that I could still score and skate, all that fun stuff,” he said. “There were no nerves whatsoever, and it was something I was excited to do.”
Mack and his fellow students would go on to beat their teachers and other adults from the community in the Telemiracle game at a score of 4-2.
McKenzie’s progress and recovery since the incident that could’ve easily confined him to a wheelchair may be proof that sometimes in life, the impossible is more possible than one may believe.
