Pandemic takes a silent toll

Athletes young and old feel lost without sports and don’t know where to turn. But there’s hope

A Toronto doctor volunteered to share some stories with a group of young athletes the other day.

It was Dr. Shady Ashamalla, the head of surgery at Sunnybrook Health Sciences, one of the front-line workers who’s been grinding through a blur of 12-hour days since the coronavirus arrived here. The athletes, listening and watching via Zoom, were of the sort mostly sidelined during the pandemic. They were junior hockey players with no games on their upcoming schedule and elite baseball players who can’t currently find an open indoor batting cage to hone their crafts. Basically, they were a cross-section of those not lucky enough to be playing sports in high revenue operations like the NBA and NHL.

Ashamalla said he saw a parallel between his existence and theirs.

“You don’t have to get the virus to suffer from it,” he told them. “Just being told you’re not important, you’re not essential, you’re not needed — sit over there for a couple of years while we sort this out — that’s enough to feel empty. For high-performance people, highperformance athletes, high-performance coaches, that’s enough to take away part of who you are. And that’s dangerous. And it’s just as dangerous as this virus.”

Coming from someone who’s seen people die from the virus, the words carried weight. Still, as Ashamalla acknowledged in a followup interview with the Star, his words are also easily misunderstood. Given the polarized state of our social-media-obsessed society, there are those who’ll see him drawing a parallel between the plight of shut-in athletes with his travails as a front-line worker as preposterous, or perhaps as anti-lockdown, even if it’s neither.

Ashamalla is among those rightly cast as heroes for doing his part to fight a global plague that’s killed more than 19,000 Canadians. On the morning when he spoke to the athletes this past week, he’d come from operating on a patient suffering from gunshot wounds to the abdomen. His work, in other words, is the definition of essential.

And as for athletes: They’ve been told, again and again during various lockdowns, that what they do is most certainly not essential. And to Ashamalla, therein lies the common ground they share.

“We all define ourselves by what we believe in, what we work at, what gives us meaning, what gives us purpose,” he said. “And that doesn’t necessarily align with the terms ‘essential’ and ‘nonessential.’ ”

With hospitals strained for resources,

“You take a triple-A hockey player that’s 11 years old. These are kids that play hockey five times a week. It’s who they are.”

DR. SHADY ASHAMALLA SUNNYBROOK HEAD SURGEON

AND LEAFS CONSULTANT

he explained, he’s among the many surgeons across the province who’ve been forced to inform a long list of patients they’ll have to wait longer than expected for their scheduled surgery. On a lot of days, in other words, he’s been sidelined from doing something he considers essential — the thing he does best — in favour of beating back the virus. Considering he specializes in saving people’s lives by removing cancer from their bodies, he said his growing backlog of operations has caused him considerable chagrin.

“I’m trained to take out people’s cancers. I’m not trained to get on a phone and explain to someone why I can’t take out their cancer,” Ashamalla said. “So I’m outside of my essence. I’m outside of who I am. And that’s been a huge source of anxiety and at times depression, trying to be somebody that I’m not to deal with this pandemic. And I think that that absolutely parallels to athletes.”

Ashamalla — a consultant surgeon for the Toronto Maple Leafs who co-owns the Grit Athletics sports training facility in Leaside, where the highest profile client happens to be Maple Leafs star Mitch Marner — said he wasn’t only talking about pro athletes.

“You take a triple-A hockey player that’s 11 years old. These are kids that play hockey five times a week. It’s who they are. They wear their jackets. It defines their personality,” he said. “And you take that away from them, you’d better have something to fill that gap. Because you’ve just made a huge hole. And if we don’t acknowledge that hole, if we don’t look at it, it’ll fill.

“It’ll fill with depression. It’ll fill with anxiety. it’ll fill with childhood obesity. It’ll fill with all kinds of stuff that’s negative.”

Ashamalla was speaking at a webinar: The Athletes’ COVID Survival Kit, organized by Dan Noble, the strength and conditioning coach to Marner and other NHLers. The online conference brought together an eclectic group of presenters — among them Blue Jays president Mark Shapiro and renowned performance coach Matt Nichol — to offer messages of hope to athletes of all levels, a group Noble calls “a forgotten community.”

“There’s just a lot of young athletes asking for help. They’re lost. They don’t know what to do. They’re depressed,” said Noble. “It’s hard for these kids. Everything you’ve done your whole life has been completely taken away and you’re being told that it’s not important anymore. I worry about the fallout.”

There are those who’d dismiss such a concern as the stuff of first-world privilege. It’s a discussion with which Ashamalla has grown weary.

“I can clearly see the impact the pandemic is having on these athletes. And on the flip side I go to my day job and I see exactly why those policies and protocols are necessary. It’s definitely been a bit of a challenge navigating those two worlds. Because quite often they’re very much in contrast with each other,” he said.

“But that’s the part that’s missed. We all know the impact of the lockdown. But it’s become such a polarized discussion. It’s almost as if you can’t be in support of the lockdown and also acknowledge and appreciate the impact of the lockdown. Because it’s very black and white, and we’ve somehow lost our ability to see shades of grey. People are afraid to discuss the negative implications of the lockdown because they’re afraid of coming across as not being in support of it.”

Good and practical advice was doled out during the webinar. Nichol brought up the story of Herschel Walker, who famously began his transformation from chubby kid to NFL star on a workout regimen based largely around copious amounts of push-ups, sit-ups and sprints. Shuttered gyms, Nichol insisted, don’t need to halt athletic development. Shapiro encouraged homebound athletes to find ways to improve themselves while dealing with less-than-optimal conditions — by improving their sleep hygiene, say, or paying more attention their nutrition. “Control the controllable,” Shapiro said, on brand as always.

Ashamalla’s address, delivered after a morning on the front lines, packed a considerable punch. He spoke of losing two people close to him to the pandemic — one to the virus, another to a suicide he considered COVID-related. And he shared a story from the early days of the virus’s arrival, when he was beckoned in the wee hours to perform what was to be his first surgery on a COVID-positive patient. So nascent was our knowledge of the virus at the time that he wasn’t sure precisely what such close contact would mean for him, his wife and two children. He was so terrified, he said, that his immediate urge was to find an excuse to get out of performing the surgery – a reaction, he said, that went against everything he stands for. There’ve been times during the past 10 months, he told the athletes, when he has resented the characterization of frontline workers as self-sacrificing and brave.

“I was told that I was a hero. I didn’t want to be a hero,” he said.

But duty called. The story goes that he eventually got into his car, cranked Tom Petty’s song “I Won’t Back Down,” drove to the hospital and performed the operation. Which was another reason he’d joined the call with the athletes: To let them know that, now that he’d found a part of himself he didn’t think existed, he’s come to believe it must reside in all of us, and that it’s up to each of us to find it.

“Find the hero inside of you. It’s there,” he told the athletes. “You have no idea much of an underachiever every one of you are … I had no idea I was capable of things I had to do. This time is forcing us to find our inner hero to save ourselves and save our society. So find your inner hero. Look for it. It’s there. I know it’s there. Because I found that little piece of me that I didn’t know existed.”