BeadyEyedDouche
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https://theathletic.com/538676/2018/09/24/back-from-the-abyss-kyle-okposo-opens-up-about-the-darkest-days-of-his-life/
I think the subscription is $5/mo...got some great writers, a lot of former TBN writers...
this one was by Tim Graham
Back from the abyss: Kyle Okposo opens up about the darkest days of his life
BUFFALO, N.Y. — In a dimly lit room off a sobering hospital corridor, Danielle Okposo curled herself in a chair every day and wearily waited for her husband to call out.
Your rings! Your rings!
She would reach out and instantly settle him.
Kyle Okposo couldn’t form full sentences. He was incoherent, confused, paranoid. He strained to recognize loved ones. He thought staffers around his bedside were there to hurt him.
Danielle was terrified. Doctors couldn’t provide answers.
Just over 18 months ago, Kyle suffered a concussion in a Buffalo Sabres workout, but the hit felt so ordinary he wouldn’t be diagnosed for days.
Even with that knowledge, medical experts from Buffalo General Hospital’s neurosurgical department, from the Sabres and from the NHL were unable to explain why Kyle had gone through a manic phase, why the lifelong introvert spent three days calling people from his past to tell them off, why he stayed awake for four days straight, why he stopped eating and dwindled to a teenage weight, why he told Danielle he was willing to harm himself simply so he could sleep again.
“Kyle Okposo could have jumped off a frigging building,” his agent, Pat Brisson, said. “He could have ended it.”
On the bathroom floor of their Clarence home, Kyle had told Danielle he was too exhausted to go on. Kyle wanted her to put him in a coma so he could shut off his brain. If not that, then he was going to leap out the window.
Enough was enough. Danielle and big sister Kendra Okposo took him to Millard Fillmore Suburban Hospital’s emergency room, where it became evident Kyle needed specialized treatment. An ambulance took him to Buffalo General to be checked into the neurosurgical intensive care unit.
“I was scared I was never …” Danielle couldn’t finish the sentence.
She sobbed at the memory of her husband being hooked up to machines that provided no insight. He was a strapping 28-year-old winger who played in the NHL All-Star Game just two months earlier. Their daughter Elliana was 3 at the time; their son Odin was 1.
Danielle rummaged for the right words to describe his condition.
“He was not lifeless,” she continued, “but he couldn’t help himself. I was scared I was not going to have my best friend back and that we were just going to have to figure out how to live life how he was.”
From the darkness — his eyes closed but with his bleary brain refusing to rest — Kyle would awaken from a brief, medically induced sleep and startle.
Your rings! Your rings!
Kyle needed his wife’s hand. Danielle wears three eternity wedding bands. Small, identically cut diamonds are inlaid all the way around.
“When I had no idea what was going on, when my mind was scrambled eggs,” Kyle said, “the only thing that grounded me was feeling her wedding rings on her finger.
“That was the only thing that kept me there. That was the only thing that calmed me down.”
Kyle would ask for Kendra, too, imploring for watch hand. He found supreme strength, however, in his wife’s rings.
He wordlessly spun them around Danielle’s finger, squeezed them, counted them. He grasped so tightly with his massive hands that her fingers swelled. She tried to wear only two bands to relieve her finger, except that upset him.
“He just needed so desperately to hold on,” Danielle said.
Danielle couldn’t alternate hands. She offered her right hand once.
No … Other hand.
“He needed that hand,” Kendra said. “He would wake up in a panic and needed to be centered and recognize someone he could trust, and that was the symbol of the person he loves the most in the world.
“You could see his body visibly calm down.”
Sweet moments of comfort essentially were all the Okposos could savor.
Kyle’s comprehensive breakdown remained mysterious. Concussions can be that way. They affect people in varying, frightening ways.
But Kyle’s situation was unnerving even by concussion standards.
His head injury, a team of doctors ultimately discovered, merely had detonated a dormant menace.
The jolt unlocked a vault Kyle hadn’t wanted to open in a dusty corner of his mind. Repressed memories of childhood trauma sent shock waves through his system.
“It opened up a blockage from his childhood,” Brisson said. “The volcano erupted.”
What happened back then is a subject Kyle will not discuss, but for the first time since his hospitalization in late March and early April 2017, he revealed details of the abyss he and his family traversed before reemerging with, those close to him insist, a profound clarity and altered personality.
Kyle and Danielle Okposo and others from his inner circle spoke with The Athletic to explain previously undisclosed facets of his illness and recovery.
The furthest Kyle has gone in divulging his descent was an open thank-you letter to Sabres fans posted in July 2017 on the team’s website. He was purposely vague. The essay was an appreciation more than an explanation.
Left unmentioned were elements that interlocked with the concussion: his serious psychiatric concerns, a pivotal neck injury and all the terror.
“I never would even talk about it unless Kyle gave permission,” said Brisson, who also represents stars such as Sidney Crosby, John Tavares and Patrick Kane. “For him, talking about it is therapeutic, and he wants to help others.
“This is something that could be an eye-opener for other people who might go through it, for anybody.”
Kyle Okposo met Danielle Hirsch the summer before their freshman year at Shattuck-St. Mary’s School in Faribault, Minn.
A group of students gathered at a local theater. Asked what the movie was, Danielle practically gagged while admitting it was “xXx,” starring Vin Diesel.
“I love that movie!” Kyle said. “There were five guys, so we spaced it strategically for where the two girls were going to sit. We left open spots. She asked one of my friends to move over so she didn’t have to sit next to me.”
With a chagrined laugh underscoring her words, Danielle added, “I swear, if that wouldn’t have happened, we wouldn’t be here today.”
“I was able to enjoy Vin Diesel at his finest,” Kyle concluded.
Danielle said they became best friends right away, but they didn’t begin dating until their senior year at Shattuck-St. Mary’s, the prep hockey powerhouse.
Both played. Kyle was a two-way forward headed to the University of Minnesota even though the New York Islanders drafted him seventh overall in 2006. Danielle went to St. Cloud State, where she was a record-setting defenseman, and became a schoolteacher.
In August 2011, after Kyle’s fourth pro season, Danielle came home from her summer job at her father’s industrial-paint company to find candles flickering, “xXx” playing on the television and, in remembrance of their first date, a Fuddruckers bag on the table.
Kyle hid behind the sofa and was on the verge of getting busted by their pit bull mix, Booker, who had been sniffing him out.
“When I heard Danielle crinkle the bag,” Kyle said, “I popped up, ran around the couch and got down on one knee.”
Inside the Fuddruckers bag was not a doggie bag or a gift card, but what would turn out to be Kyle Okposo’s ICU lifeline six years later.
Kyle evolved into a bulwark for a quality Islanders club that reached the playoffs three times in his last four seasons with them.
He led the Islanders with 27 goals and 69 points in 2013-14 and would have repeated as scoring champion the next season had a detached retina not required emergency surgery to save the vision in his left eye.
Over his final three seasons with the Islanders, he averaged .88 points a game.
Kyle’s leadership and true-blue personality made him part of the Islanders’ identity.
“I trust him with my life,” said Tavares, his close friend, former Islanders linemate and rookie-season roommate. “If you have the qualities Kyle Okposo has, you’re living life the right way.”
Matt Moulson played with Kyle as an Islander and a Sabre. The Moulsons and Okposos became such dear friends that Kyle and Danielle are the godparents to Matt and his wife Alicia’s son, George.
“He had a presence even when we were younger,” said Tavares, now with the Toronto Maple Leafs, “where guys gravitated to him because of his maturity level and intelligence and care he has for others.
“He means a lot to me. We understand each other as people really well. I look up to him for his core values, as a dad, a husband, a family man.”
Tavares noted the immense stress the Okposos felt about leaving Long Island two offseasons ago, when Kyle was a free agent. The Sabres signed Kyle to a seven-year, $42 million contract.
Kyle’s first season in Buffalo was turbulent. He played well, notching 19 goals and 26 assists in 65 games.
But broken ribs forced him to miss 10 games in March.
In his last rehabilitation workout before coming back — on the final play of the last drill — the Okposos’ world wobbled off its axis.
It was March 21, 2017.
Kyle Okposo doesn’t recall the hit being vicious. He’s careful not to name the teammate who checked him so as not to make him feel guilty for what transpired subsequently.
“My head hit the boards,” Kyle said, reenacting the motion by cocking his neck to the left, “just smoked the glass.”
Kyle came off the KeyBank Center ice, walked to the Sabres’ dressing room and drank a protein shake he hadn’t liked since college. He doesn’t know why.
In retrospect, as innocent as his post-practice decision was, that was the first clue something was amiss.
Kyle went home without a care about his health. He looked forward to skating four nights later against Toronto.
When he entered the house, Danielle sensed something was wrong. She asked him if he was OK yet couldn’t take his word for it. She called Alicia Moulson to ask Matt if anything had happened to Kyle at practice.
Danielle’s suspicion escalated as, according to everyone involved, Kyle became manic.
The player repeatedly characterized in profiles as “shy” or “quiet” or “introverted” began lecturing about hockey in principled absolutes, vowing to turn outspoken, to play the right way, to reprimand teammates he didn’t believe were falling in line.
“Something clicked in my brain from the injury,” Kyle said.
He became agitated about his past. He fussed in terms Danielle couldn’t understand and made phone call after phone call to people he felt had aggrieved him but until now had been too timid to push back on.
Kyle unleashed on them all.
“I just started telling people what I thought,” Kyle said. “I’d never really done that before on a consistent basis, and it felt really, really good.”
The catharsis, however, didn’t stop. Kyle wouldn’t sleep. Danielle took away his phone.
Frantic for support, Danielle dialed Kendra in hopes of translating what Kyle was jabbering about. Before the call was over, Kendra had logged onto Priceline.com and booked a flight from Minneapolis to Buffalo.
“When I get there,” Kendra said, “Kyle is manic and talking about a lot of things that don’t make a lot of sense. There was no linear thought. It was illogical.
“He was able to listen to me and Danielle when we would say, ‘Hang up the phone, Kyle. Stop calling.’ It might take two or three times, but he was listening to us. He would say, ‘You’re right. I know this doesn’t make sense.’ ”
To Kendra, however, Kyle was understandable.
That line Kyle won’t cross while telling his story, his big sister also lived it.
“Kyle and I have been through a lot,” Kendra said. “We have both talked to each other in times of very significant pain and sadness and trauma. We’ve helped each other through things like that.
“Going through this with him in the beginning, to me, felt like … I can’t describe it. It just felt like this is what I was here for, to be solid, to be stable, to be calm for him and Danielle.”
Kendra Okposo is an attorney at the University of Minnesota. She’s associate to the director of Equal Opportunity and Affirmative Action. Her job is to respond to reports of discrimination and sexual misconduct on campus. She also runs her own investigation services business.
“There were points in my adult life,” Kendra said, “where I similarly had repressed memories, and floods of things were triggered by different stimulus in the world. I went through therapy and different ways of processing.
“When he would tell me, ‘I’m having flashes of this,’ I could relate to that because I’d been through it. I was able to say, ‘I know what you’re seeing. I was with you when that happened.’ So that didn’t freak me out.”
Kyle still felt compelled to show the Sabres and the world his new, inspired style of hockey.
He skated 15:34 against the Maple Leafs and picked up two assists in a 5-2 victory. Two nights later, he played 15:57 in a 4-2 victory over the Florida Panthers.
“I was way more vocal,” Kyle said. “I was so determined to play the right way and try to fix everything about the organizational path.
“But by the second game, I had no energy. I was falling all over the ice, could barely stay on my feet.”
Classic concussion symptoms began slamming him.
He couldn’t leave a dark room, was easily confused, wasn’t interested in eating, couldn’t sleep.
“It went from 0 to 100 pretty quick,” Danielle said. “Everything spiraled.”
On his fourth straight day without sleep, Kyle asked his wife to put him in a coma.
How was she supposed to do that? He doesn’t know. He was drawing his thoughts from pitch-dark places of gasping fatigue.
“I wanted her to take me to the hospital in the morning and put me in a coma,” Kyle said. “Then, in my head, I thought, ‘Maybe I should jump out this window and go to sleep.’
“Everything is foggy after that.”
Kyle weighed 211 pounds against the Panthers. By the time he checked into Buffalo General’s neurosurgical ICU, he was down to 199 pounds.
Danielle’s parents, Dave and Bonnie Hirsch, collected the Okposos’ children to watch over them at their Florida home.
With her husband’s life seemingly in the balance, Danielle didn’t have her children to hug for six weeks. She felt a mother’s guilt. Their son, Odin, celebrated his first birthday in Florida without her.
“There were times,” Danielle said through tears, “when I broke down and thought, ‘I’m never getting Kyle back.’ There were a lot of times like that.
“But when you have my family, my brother, Kyle’s sister, our closest friends that were there for us, that just let me know I wasn’t alone.”
Matt Moulson slept in the hospital lobby. Alicia Moulson cooked for Danielle to make sure she ate.
Kyle’s inner circle tried whatever it could to soothe him. He responded well to a blanket from home because of the smell. On the sly, Danielle brought Booker to give his dad some sniffs and cuddles.
“I had no control over my thoughts. I had no sense of time, of anything,” Kyle said. “It lasted for a few days, where I was in that place.
“The absolute worst thoughts possible, the deepest fears you didn’t even know you had … I always thought my deepest fear was being paralyzed. Through this experience, not even close. That’s not my deepest fear.”
Kyle stopped there and looked into the distance to keep from crying.
But the question had to be asked: What is that deepest fear?
“It’s living without my wife and my kids,” he replied. “And I thought that was going to happen.”
Your rings! Your rings!
He didn’t want to let go.
Kyle Okposo guesstimated at least 15 doctors examined him or provided an opinion based on his myriad test results.
Danielle expressed her gratitude for the Sabres’ medical staff and athletic trainers, for the NHL Players Association, Buffalo General and all the rest.
“There wasn’t anything that was missed when it came to Kyle’s care,” Danielle said. “Not that he was meant to go through this, but everyone showed up when they needed to.”
At their bleakest, the Okposos were carried by a doctor they call “their guardian angel.”
Dr. Paula Del Regno, a top psychiatrist at Buffalo General, found ways to assure Kyle during lucid moments.
“A lot of the doctors wanted to send me to a psych ward,” Kyle said. “But she saved me by believing in me because, when I would have fits of normalcy, when they would give me medicine and I would stable out for a little bit, I apparently would tell them, ‘I just want to be a good dad. That’s all I want to be.’
“When I was in my most vulnerable state, that’s all I was thinking about. I wasn’t thinking about hockey. I was thinking about my family, that my kids grow up the right way and be good people.”
Kyle left Buffalo General after a week and a half, but his brain still wasn’t resting sufficiently.
He was on antidepressant and antipsychotic medications and benzodiazepine to help him sleep.
“I was on those for a period of time,” Kyle said, “and it scared me that I still was sleeping only about four hours a night. When I did sleep, I wasn’t sleeping that hard.”
Then came another doctor Kyle doesn’t want to name for reasons kept to himself. This doctor, Kyle explained, specializes in soft tissue and chiropractic care, but is working on an advanced degree in neuroscience.
“I saw him and was still on these medications and never knew if I would be normal again,” Kyle said. “We did an MRI, and he treated me.”
Kyle said he has dealt with a nagging neck issue “for years.” While hockey injuries are treated like highly sensitive information that could jeopardize Western civilization if revealed, there aren’t any reports Kyle has missed significant playing time because of his neck. Kyle didn’t mention a neck problem in his open thank you letter.
But having his neck treated in the spring of 2017 apparently proved pivotal to his recovery.
“He found a spot on me and my eyes rolled back in my head,” Kyle said. “He kept me in his office to make sure I didn’t have a seizure. I was so scared, but I just started bawling because it was a huge release.
“I still had the anxiety, and when I saw him a couple days later he gave me another adjustment. It was like a car crash. I sat there, couldn’t move and started crying again.
“I could actually feel blood rushing through to parts of my body. I went home and slept for three hours on the couch and nine hours that night, the first time I slept in almost a month and a half.”
Danielle, Kendra and the rest of Kyle’s inner circle rejoiced. Finally, a breakthrough. Medications eventually were discontinued.
The next step was deciding whether Kyle should expose himself to a potentially catastrophic head injury by resuming his hockey career.
Danielle remembered the conversation went something like this.
Him: “Of course, I’m playing again.”
Her: “Wait. What?”
She relented, in part, because she knows what it’s like to have your competitive passion erased. She broke her leg in eight places her junior season at St. Cloud State but came back as a senior against what she conceded was sounder judgment.
More importantly, the Okposos felt they had a handle on Kyle’s mental health triggers.
A roadmap to management and recovery was in place. The Okposos’ support staff was educated and prepared to respond again if necessary.
Danielle, meanwhile, was pregnant with their third child.
Kyle met with doctors about the dangers and listened to Brisson lay out all the pros and cons. Kyle admitted he has far-off concerns about chronic traumatic encephalopathy, but said he harbored those thoughts long before he was hospitalized.
What happened in March 2017, Kyle rationalized, was more about repressed traumatic memories than his head striking the KeyBank Center glass.
“But coming into last training camp,” Kyle said, “you better believe I was scared to go on the road and whether I would go to sleep.”
Kyle had a statistically substandard season in 2017-18. He had 15 goals and 29 assists in 76 games. He posted a minus-34 rating, second-worst in the league.
Then again, the Sabres had the worst record in the NHL and scored a league-low 199 goals.
He was the Sabres’ nominee for the Masterton Memorial Trophy, awarded to the player who best exemplifies perseverance, sportsmanship and dedication.
The Okposo-enhanced concussion protocol was tested nine days after Danielle gave birth to daughter Livia.
On March 8, 2018, he was diagnosed with another concussion after colliding with Ottawa Senators forward Bobby Ryan.
Kyle missed only three games and played 11 days later with no lingering effects.
“I promise you that if anything were to happen to him on the ice and I noticed something, then I would speak up,” Sabres defenseman Marco Scandella said. “If I saw things were off, I would not let my friend, my teammate, my brother go back out there.
“I want to see him be happy in life. There’s a lot of life after this game.”
Danielle ventured Kyle was back to his old self mentally by July 2017, although those close to him have observed that his assertive personality seems permanent.
His outspokenness wasn’t caused by delirium after all.
“Now I’m getting back to where I want to be elite again,” Kyle said. “I want to be the player that I know I can be. I want to challenge myself to be more of that person, to be the person that says what’s on his mind.”
For example, if a teammate is dogging it at practice, then Kyle intends to put him on blast.
That said, extroversion has been a learning process for him. The concussion didn’t toggle a switch that transformed Clint Eastwood straight into Jim Carrey.
“I was talking to one of my mentors on the phone the other night,” Kyle said. “He went, ‘Let me ask you a question. Do you really give a (frank) what people think of you?’
“I thought about it for a long time. I said, ‘I do, but I know that I shouldn’t.’ This guy is overconfident, but it works for him, and he can pull it back if he needs to. I’m the other way, where I’m sort of underconfident.”
At least Kyle is aware that his swagger can wane.
Okposo and Scandella hold heart-to-heart talks about the mental aspects of hockey.
“When he’s confident,” Scandella said, “he’s one of the best players in the world. He has these dips. Sometimes he lets things affect him a little bit.
“Because the physical side of the game brings him such energy, I felt like sometimes last year he was hesitating a little. You can’t even hesitate a fraction of a second when making a decision in this game.
“But when he’s feeling it, there’s such a great energy in the room, and he’s someone we all rally around.”
Tavares expressed faith in his old friend’s revised approach.
They spent quality time together over the summer. Okposo attended Tavares’ bachelor party and wedding. They went on a golf trip to Bandon Dunes Golf Resort in Oregon.
“He went through something very deep,” Tavares said. “He looks at what he went through as an opportunity for growth.
“He’s found his way and understands how he wants to live his life. I think he had that before, but this has taken it to another level that allowed him to learn about himself and grow from it.”
In the world’s grand scheme, engaging with another hockey player about sports psychology or competitive ethics doesn’t take courage.
But Kendra Okposo was impressed — and a tad nervous — to learn Kyle was revealing to a reporter delicate details about his nightmare. As an attorney and big sister, she was tempted to talk Kyle out of putting his story out there in the world.
“This article is a perfect example of how he has changed,” Kendra said. “He never would have done this before.
“This is such an incredible show of strength and champions mental health in a way I don’t know he would have done two years ago. I’ve really seen a shift in all those areas in his willingness to step into his own power.”
In February, Kyle became a spokesman for Just Tell One, a public awareness campaign that focuses on mental health and substance abuse issues among youth and young adults in Western New York.
The program urges conversation with a trusted person and emphasizes that sharing emotions and asking for help are not signs of weakness.
“My experience,” Kyle said, “made me really take a hard look at why people do things they do, why they fall into depression or isolate themselves or commit suicide or have suicidal thoughts.
“There’s a fear of being vulnerable, of telling people exactly how you feel. That was scarier than anything for me. But when you do decide to open up, the reward that you get is so worth it.”
Kyle Okposo realizes he’s more blessed than most.
In his grim desperation, Danielle remained right there. He could touch her three rings and feel reassured.
Now he considers it his turn to extend himself, to offer a hand to squeeze.
“I want to use my platform to help people who don’t have an outlet or who don’t trust somebody enough to talk,” Kyle said. “I want people to think they can trust me, talk to me about whatever and know that I’ll do what I can to help them.
“I was always taught to internalize my negative experiences. Down in the core of my being, I didn’t want to do that. All along, I had the substance inside me that knew what I should do.
“What I want to do is talk to people and tell them what I feel.”
- Michael Pachla
Wow, will read after work, thanks!  |
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