Giving Thanks
Army hockey player who had ‘life-threatening’ neck injury expresses gratitude to trainer, doctor who saved life
He looks in the mirror and sees a reminder on the right side of his neck of what happened in Bridgeport on Jan. 5, a reminder of the bond he’ll have with his athletic trainer for life, a life she saved.
There’s only one problem with that reminder.
“I was always joking with Rachel that I wish the scar was, like, big,” Army junior men’s hockey forward Eric Huss said Tuesday in a conference call with Army trainer Rachel Leahy and St. Vincent’s Medical Center trauma surgeon Matthew Carlson.
“Dr. Carlson did an amazing job closing the wound. It’s getting me out of shaving, which is nice.”
It was a nice moment of levity to cap a discussion of a night that could have ended much differently.
The Black Knights were at Total Mortgage Arena to face Sacred Heart on Jan. 5. In the second period, Huss said, he was backchecking on a Sacred Heart player when his linemate threw a body check on that Pioneer.
“When he hit him, his foot just came up and it – honestly, it felt like I had been hit in the face with a punch,” Huss said. Carlson said he believes Huss’ jawbone took the brunt of the initial contact with the skate, or the cut that Huss actually received from the blade might have been much more severe.
“It didn’t even register that I’d been cut or anything. I kind of felt concussed.”
Seeing a whole lot of blood on the ice, Huss assumed he’d lost teeth, but he soon realized that wasn’t it. His helmet had popped off, so he skated toward the Army bench. Leahy said she was watching the linemate to make sure he got up all right from the collision, and then she saw the trail of blood behind Huss.
“I put one foot up on the
boards and hopped two feet over,” she said. “He was picking his head up towards me, and that’s when I saw how much bleeding was occurring.
“I got two hands kind of on his wound, on his face, and was like, ‘We’re going this way,’ ” toward the Zamboni door, EMTs and an ambulance.
The teamwork from disparate groups shone through in Leahy’s words, from Sacred Heart trainer Ben St. Martin jumping in to help, arena staff and medical staff prepping to get Huss to the hospital, the person who gave Leahy a boost when she realized there was nowhere for her to stand in the ambulance, so she got on top of Huss so she could keep pressure on the wound all the way to St. Vincent’s.
Leahy, who has a bachelor’s degree in athletic training and sports medicine from Quinnipiac, said emergency-management classes are part of a trainer’s undergraduate and graduate education. Every semester at Army, she goes through an emergency action plan with the team physicians, going over what would happen
in any given emergency.
‘I knew that going into any type of situation this severe, I was going to act quickly. It’s my job to do so,” she said. “I think about it every day. It’s one of those severe ice-hockeyspecific injuries that occur.
“We’ll be on the ice at practice,” she added, “and I’ll just be kind of checking my equipment: Am I close enough to towels? Are there gloves in my pocket? Just kind of running through a simulation in my mind every day, just in case.”
A physician’s assistant took over from Leahy at St. Vincent’s, Carlson said. Huss was pale but calm and alert, the doctor said, and the paramedic that brought Huss in said he thought Huss’ carotid artery was intact. They got him to the operating room and found that Huss’ facial artery on the right side had been severed.
“There was some injury to the muscle of the neck, but the primary lifethreatening injury that he had was an injury to his facial artery,” Carlson said, “which we were able to clamp and sort of ligate both ends of that.”
He said Huss woke up asking where Leahy was.
“(Leahy) singlehandedly got him to the hospital in as good a shape as he was,” Carlson said. “She saved his life, in no uncertain terms.
“Certainly getting the training up front, preparing as Rachel was saying,” he added later, “but I still think it takes, even if it’s ‘your job,’ it still takes a special person to jump right in, not delay and do what needs to be done. I think she’s downplaying it a little bit. Actually doing it when it happens is something a little bit different.”
Atlantic Hockey named Leahy its player of the week.
Huss wasn’t wearing a neck guard, a piece of equipment wrapped around the neck designed to resist skate-blade injury, but the cut he received was high enough that it would’ve missed a neck guard.
Still, “my personal belief, I will be wearing a neck guard when I’m playing,” Huss said. “I think for a younger athlete, if I had a kid, I’d definitely have them wearing a neck guard. As they get older, I think it’s their personal choice. My injury was so high up on the face that a neck guard wouldn’t really be there to protect me, but going forward I’ll definitely be wearing a neck guard.”
Huss said he’s hoping to get back on the ice in a week or so and return to action in two or three weeks. He’s not expecting thoughts about the incident to linger, but he said he has checked out his school’s copious mentalhealth resources if he needs them.
“I’m just super-thankful for Rachel,” Huss said. “She saved my life, and obviously the medical team at St. Vincent’s, Dr. Carlson, they did an amazing job. Everything went so fast. They did a great job keeping me calm. At no point was I extremely worried.
He paused a second. “How do you thank someone for saving your life? It’s pretty hard. but I’m going to get there, find a way to. I’m feeling incredibly blessed, honestly.”