A tough lesson in on-ice accident
DART officer takes experience to Pakistan Leaves nothing to chance after hockey mishap
ISLAMABAD, PAKISTAN—
As liaison officer between Canada’s Disaster Assistance Response Team, the Canadian high commission in Islamabad and the clutch of aid agencies already operating in earthquake-stricken Pakistan, it’s Kyle Paul’s job to leave nothing to chance. And the 31- year- old says it’s no accident that’s one of his strong suits. After a February 2004 accident playing university hockey left him temporarily paralyzed, Paul says he tries to be deliberate in everything he does. A former ‘ Junior A’ defenceman with the Flin Flon Bombers, Paul wound up playing at the University of Oklahoma last year by happenstance.
Years after playing for Flin Flon and later attending Royal Military College in Kingston, the Saskatoon native had finished training as an aerospace weapons controller — someone who uses radar to help pilots already in the air track possible threats — and had asked to be transferred to Tinker Air Force Base in Oklahoma City, where people with his skills were in demand. When he arrived in the U. S. Midwest, Paul, the son of a Canada Post mail fraud inspector, played in beer leagues and coached kids’ teams and began a friendship with the coach of the University of Oklahoma’s hockey team. Why not come back and play one more year, the coach asked.
“ I was 30 and the other oldest guy on the team was 21,” says Paul. “ It was interesting. I guess I just missed the locker room and being one of the guys.” But in the final game of the season, Paul’s feel- good swan song took a horrific turn. A rival from the University of Colorado levelled Paul with a body check that caught the 6- foot- 1, 220pounder on the side of the chin and left him crumpled on the ice.
“ But then I tried to get up and I just couldn’t move at all. I wanted to get up, but my body wouldn’t let me,” he says.
Doctors found bone spurs near the base of Paul’s skull had knifed into his spinal column. “ It was scary,” he says. “ I didn’t know if I’d ever walk again.” Ten days after the accident, doctors operated to remove the bone spurs.
Paul, wearing a collar, was able to walk out of the hospital.
In Pakistan’s earthquake zone, meanwhile, underfunded aid agencies are struggling to head off a second wave of deaths as a bitter Himalayan winter closes in four weeks after the giant tremor killed 73,000 people.
Doctors treating hundreds of pneumonia cases warned that hundreds of thousands risk death or disease unless they move below the snowline or get emergency shelter. “Many, many people will die and many will be children as they are most vulnerable,” Dagmar Chocholaclova, a Czech doctor working in a village near Bagh in Pakistani Kashmir, said.