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Wednesday, December 1, 1999
Slow recovery for Savage
MONTREAL (CP) -- Brian Savage remembers the pain.Hot. Sharp. Overwhelming.
The Canadiens left-winger remembers wave after wave of fear washing over him.
He remembers sweeping into the Los Angeles Kings' defensive zone a week ago Saturday, head down, drawing his stick back as far as it would go with the style, snarl, power and intensity that was a microcosm of a splendid start to a season during which he delivered a team-leading 12 goals.
He had a hat trick in the third game of the season, a 4-1 victory in Calgary. Three games later, his overtime goal was part of another three-goal game in a 5-4 win in Philadelphia, where visiting teams seldom win. Two nights later, he scored the winner in a 2-1 victory over Buffalo.
Ten more games were to pass until the Canadiens won another. This time, Savage had a goal and an assist in a 2-1 victory over Anaheim.
Put it this way: offensively, for the first one-quarter of the season, there was Brian Savage and then there were the rest of the Canadiens. Until now.
Savage was on his 12th shift of the night when he jumped on the puck a little more than four minutes into the second period. He would later be told that the momentum of his swing, a missed shot after a Los Angeles backchecker got to him first, carried him into an onrushing Kings centreman named Ian Laperriere, intent on finishing his check.
The thunderous collision sent Savage crashing to the ice, legs kicking, arms waving, his face distorted and crumpling, as if someone had squeezed ham-like hands around a cheap aluminum-foil tray.
Savage remembers the anxious looks of medical people hovering over him. He vaguely remembers being carried from the ice on a stretcher, the Staples Center crowd now stilled. He can still hear his older brother Dave, a teacher in the Los Angeles area, walking alongside the stretcher. "Brian, Brian, are you all all right? Are you OK? It's Dave, Brian!"
"I'm fine," Brian said. He wasn't.
------
Tuesday, Savage sat in his Westmount townhouse, imprisoned in an upper body brace. An iron rod supported his jaw, another was on the back of his head to prevent it from moving forward or sideways.
In layman's terms, he has three cracked vertebrae on his spine (two were discovered in Los Angeles, a third when experts studied the MRI in Montreal). There is swelling on the spine, the result of what doctors suspect is ligament damage. The extent of that damage won't be known until the edema is markedly reduced, probably as soon as Friday.
"I remember the hit," Savage said. "I remember everything. The pain -- it was kind of, you know, you stub your toe or you bang your knee walking in the dark and you're in pain for a minute or so. It's like a burner, and then it goes away. This one was constant. It didn't go away, like -- for 40 minutes. The pain was there right in the middle of my back, and I was screaming.
"I was scared when I looked around and everybody was standing around," Savage said. "A lot of things were going through my head at the time. Am I goning to play? Am I going to walk? Am I -- you know, you don't know what's wrong with you, so you don't really know what's going to happen. I was the most scared when we got to the hospital. They did one set of X-rays. It took about 40 minutes. The doctor said everything seems fine, everything's going to be great."
Brian's brother was on the telephone with Brian's wife, Debbie, after the first set of X-rays. Brian grabbed the phone to reassure her. "Deb, it seems like everything's all right. A burner."
"Then we got to do the MRI," Savage recounted. "He said it was only going to take a half hour, 40 minutes at the most. It took an hour and 20 minutes, so when I got out of there, I figured, you know, maybe something's wrong because it took a lot longer."
"There were some cloudy areas around a couple (C4 and C7) of your vertebrae," Savage was told, "so we're going to do a bone scan."
"That's when I sort of got nervous," Savage said. "One of the scans took about an hour and a half."
Bad news travels fast. "You've cracked your C4 and C7 vertebrae," the doctor told Savage.
"At that moment, that's when it all hit," Savage said.
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