No Days Off

by Max Domi

  I could feel my face going red as I dug in. I knew that the trainer was just doing his job, but I didn’t want the special attention. I would have preferred if I could have just quietly picked up my food on my own. I was grateful that none of my teammates said anything about it.

  If it wasn’t a trainer hovering over my shoulder, though, it was my dad. And if not my dad, my mom was there. Both of my parents had come over to watch me play, and they were everywhere that Team Canada was. My mom was so worried about me traveling that she had made laminated cards that described all of my medical conditions in three languages. She made me carry one, distributed them to the team trainers, and kept a stack on hand, just in case.

  That was the peak of my no-one-else-can-tell-me-what-to-do phase. I felt that I had been dealing with my diabetes long enough that nobody else really knew what I was going through. If they didn’t know what it was like to go low or go high, how could they tell me what to do? Did they not think that I knew how my own body worked? Did they think I couldn’t take care of myself?

  I should have been thankful for the help, because finding gluten-free foods in the Czech Republic and Slovakia wasn’t easy. Telling someone that I had celiac disease didn’t mean much, even to the guys on the team. I was in the middle of one of the most intense hockey tournaments I’d ever played in, and I was living off of salad, soup, and gluten-free peanut butter protein bars that the team trainers had packed.

  The tournament was full of those sorts of eye-opening experiences. When it came down to it, though, we were there for one thing: hockey.

  The night before we were supposed to play the Swedes, some members of the Swedish team snuck a video camera into our practice to film us. My dad, being the hockey-loving super-dad that he is, was watching our practice. He spotted the camera unattended and decided to head over and make sure it was shut off, one way or another.

  As he walked over, the Team Canada coaches started firing pucks into the stands, trying to knock over the camera. The Swedish coaches heard the racket and didn’t take that too well, and they were even less impressed when my dad finally picked up the camera and strolled off with it so that he could turn it off. But the guys on the team loved it—we were dying laughing as we cheered on the coaches.

  The film didn’t help the other teams—we were undefeated in the round robin, beat the Czech Republic in the semifinal, and then beat Finland 4–0 in the championship game. Nathan MacKinnon had a hat trick that night, and as we gathered around center ice with our gold medals, gluten-free food and medical cards were the last things on my mind.

  * * *

  The experience overseas set me up for my second year with the London Knights. Having seen how difficult it was to manage my diabetes without the right food available, I was much more thankful for the options I had at home.

  One of the nicest things about the transition from minor midget hockey to the OHL was the quality of the facilities and the support staff. I don’t think anyone knew better than the trainers what I had to go through on a day-to-day basis during the season.

  In my second year with the Knights, I met with our new trainer, Doug Stacey. I sat down in Doug’s office and talked him through everything about my diabetes. We tried to cover every single detail. He made a note of my prime blood sugar numbers, what to look for when I was off, and what foods I could and couldn’t eat.

  That was one of the hardest periods of my diabetes management. My body was changing—the way it responded to insulin and processed carbohydrates was different when I was seventeen than it had been when I was fourteen. And I knew it would be different again when I was twenty. And on top of that, I was trying to become a professional athlete, living away from home, trying to get drafted, and dealing with the rigorous schedule of junior hockey.

  To manage all of that was a real team effort between Doug and me. When it came to our game-day routine, Doug and I had it down to a science. Doug would poke his head in and make sure I had measured my blood sugar levels an hour and a half before a game, then again before and after the warm-up. Once the game started, at every ten-minute mark, Doug would hand me my blood testing kit and I’d check again.

  Even though we were constantly monitoring my blood sugar, Doug would still have all of our backup options in place on the bench, just in case there were any issues. He would keep a stock of insulin on the bench for me, along with extra drinks, some with sugar in them and some without. Whatever the situation, Doug was prepared.

  Doug used to joke with me that he could always tell when my blood sugar was high because I would get super-aggressive on the ice. He’d see me charging into the corner all out, and when I got back to the bench, he’d quietly hand me one of the sugar-free drinks to help me balance out. If I was looking lethargic or wasn’t back-checking as hard I could, he’d pass me one of the sugary sports drinks instead to get my numbers back up. And if I ever told him I needed something stronger, he would have glucose tablets on hand for an extra kick. Doug would never argue with me. He and I operated on trust, and we were in it together.

  When you have type 1 diabetes as an athlete, you make a stronger connection to your trainer than most other players because you spend so much more time with them on a daily basis. There were some guys who never set foot in the training or medical rooms. But when you have type 1 diabetes, you get to know your trainer like he’s family.

  A few weeks later, I was having breakfast when I got a call from my dad.

  “Max, make sure you’re at practice today,” he said.

  “I’m at every practice, Dad.”

  “I know, but it’s especially important today—Wayne Gretzky is coming by.”

  I laughed. “Sure, Dad.”

  “I’m serious. Make sure you’re there.”

  I wasn’t sure whether to believe my dad or not, so I didn’t know how to respond. I couldn’t believe that the Great One would show up at our practice for no reason. Surely he had more important things to get to?

  A little while later, though, my dad called me back. He was serious about what he’d said earlier. It turned out Gretzky was in town for some other requirement, and—I’m not sure whose idea it was—my dad told me that a photographer was going to be there to take a picture of me and Gretzky. I still didn’t know what that meant.

  When I got off the ice from practice that day, sure enough, Wayne Gretzky was waiting outside our dressing room. I couldn’t believe it!

  I was still in my sweaty gear, but we spent some time just chatting together, which was priceless. At one point, a photographer did appear and took our photo. There’s a famous picture that was taken years ago of Gordie Howe and Wayne Gretzky at a sports banquet. When Gretzky posed with Howe for the photo, Gordie took his stick and playfully hooked it around Wayne’s neck. That day in London, I was sitting there in my practice jersey and Wayne had a suit on. Just before we took the photo, he grabbed one of my sticks and hooked it around me just like Gordie Howe did all those years ago.

  I told myself that this year would be the big one for me. It was time for me to start playing hockey seriously and make it a full-time commitment. And that included staying on top of my diabetes with testing and insulin and diet.

  I was starting to see my diabetes as a strength. It kept me focused and made me more responsible than I ever would have been if I didn’t have it. It meant I was always focused on staying ready for the next shift, the next game, the next tournament. It gave me drive and purpose.

  Up to that point, I’d never had any reason to see my diabetes as a weakness. It had never stopped me from doing the things other kids did, and nobody had ever chirped me about having diabetes. So when it happened that year, I was more surprised than anything. I had been jawing at an older player on another team, and we’d been pestering each other all night. Halfway through the game, he lined up beside our bench for a face-off, and one of my teammates said something pretty bad to him. The guy looked at the bench, but he seemed confused about who had taunted him. So he looked at me
and said, “Hey, Domi, how’s your diabetes doing, bud?”

  It was the lamest chirp I’d ever heard. A split second passed, and then I started laughing along with the guys beside me.

  “That’s the best you can come up with?” I asked. The guy shut up after that.

  On the ice, my second season was going well. But off the ice, things hit a rough patch. My first year had shown me how much freedom I had as a junior player. I didn’t have any parents to answer to. That meant that my teammates and I could go out anywhere we wanted to, whenever we wanted to. It was unreal.

  As a player, I was having success on the ice, which meant I was pretty much under the spotlight the whole time I was in London—the fans in that city love their team. As a team, we were setting records; at one point, we went on a twenty-four-game winning streak. The whole city was buzzing, and as a team, we were on a high. So, naturally, the bubble was about to burst.

  It was February 2, 2013, and we were traveling from London to Owen Sound on a bitterly cold afternoon to go play the Attack. It was a long, dull drive, and on this particular night it was freezing cold and snowing.

  All I wanted to do was curl up and go to sleep during the trip. So I put on a show on my iPad, and I was so exhausted that I was asleep halfway through it. When I woke up, I was in the back of an ambulance.

  It was entirely my fault. When we’d left London, Doug, our trainer, had brought me my usual meal. He’d handed me the box, with “Max” written on the top.

  “Thanks,” I’d said without looking up from my phone. I’d put the meal on the seat beside me, and then I’d fallen asleep before I had a chance to eat it.

  When the bus stopped at a Tim Hortons, I had still been resting. The boys knew I couldn’t eat anything from Tim’s, so they left me there while they grabbed some food. When the bus left the rest stop, I was still sleeping. It was only when we arrived at Owen Sound and everyone but me got off the bus that they realized something was wrong. A couple of guys had tried to wake me up.

  “Max, are you all right? We need to go,” they’d said as they shook my shoulder. But I was just lying there, absolutely soaked in sweat and staring straight ahead, completely still.

  The boys had called over Doug, and he immediately gave me a shot of glucagon. Glucagon is another hormone produced by the pancreas. It stimulates the liver to release glucose into the blood, which increases blood sugar levels. A glucagon shot is a part of the low blood sugar emergency kit—the shot comes with several parts that have to be mixed together, so there are a few steps needed to prepare it when it’s being given to a person who is having a severe low sugar reaction. It’s basically an EpiPen for diabetes. A shot of glucagon can raise a person’s blood sugar level quickly if its dangerously low, or hypoglycemic. In those cases, the blood sugar level is so low that you can lose consciousness, so the glucagon is incredibly important.

  But the glucagon shot wasn’t enough. Luckily, there was an ambulance at every OHL game and this one was sitting right next to our team bus, so the paramedics ran over.

  They filled me in on everything as we drove to the hospital. I could barely recall what they were talking about—it felt like I had dreamed the past few hours.

  “Do you know where you are, Max?” one of the paramedics asked me as they gave me a second shot of glucagon.

  “Florida,” I said groggily.

  “Where?”

  My head started to clear as the glucose hit my bloodstream. “Owen Sound,” I said slowly. “I’m here to play hockey.”

  By the time we got to the hospital, I had recovered. When the doctors came in to check on me, I said, “I feel one hundred percent. I’m ready to go play.”

  Doug had come to the hospital with me, and he immediately shot down that idea.

  “We already decided—you’re sitting out the game for precautionary reasons,” Doug said. “You gave us a good scare, Max. We’re not taking any chances”

  I finally managed to convince the doctors to let me go watch the last half of the game from the stands. Afterward, the guys came over to tell me their version of the events. They kept saying what a great job Doug had done, and most of them admitted they’d had no clue what to do. A lot of them were still shaken.

  It was weird to see my teammates react that way. These were some big, tough hockey players, but they had never seen me or anyone else experience anything like that before.

  “Thanks, guys,” I said. “I really appreciate that you’ve all got my back. I’m sorry for putting you through that.”

  The worst part of the whole thing was that the team had to contact my billet family, and they would then have had to tell my mom and dad. I knew that was a phone call that would have made my parents feel sick. I hated making them worry, but they were just happy that I was okay and that everything turned out all right.

  That was the only junior game that I missed because of my diabetes. I was so mad at myself. How in the world had I forgotten to eat? I’d made all these promises to myself and set these goals for making this my best year yet, and I’d let my guard down again.

  Doug and I had a talk after we got back to London, and we both agreed that the scariest thing was how fast things could go sideways with this disease.

  “Max, I’m glad you’re okay,” Doug said. “This can’t happen again. We got lucky this time. Let’s learn from this and grow from it.”

  Doug knew I wanted to play in the NHL. And he told it the way it was, even if it meant hitting a nerve and telling me something I didn’t want to hear. But he also knew how to help me get back on track.

  Around Easter in my second year, Doug invited me over to his house for dinner. When I got there, Doug introduced me to his six-year-old daughter, Delaney.

  “Do you want to play the Easter egg hiding game?” she asked me immediately.

  “Absolutely,” I said. “How do you want to do it?”

  “I’ll hide Easter eggs around the house, and you look for them. Then we switch and I get to find them.”

  For the next two hours, I felt like a little kid. We went tearing around the house, pulling chocolate eggs out of drawers and from under furniture. Finally, Doug had to stop us so that we could all eat dinner.

  Being in a welcoming home like Doug’s on the holiday was fantastic, and it helped me to clear my head. I remained close with Doug’s family, too—Delaney even changed her jersey number to 16.

  With the incident on the bus behind me, I zeroed back in on my goal of being the best player and person I could. And it paid off. Our team kept getting better and better, and when the playoffs rolled around, we were crushing teams again, just like we had the year before.

  We ended up facing a tough Barrie Colts team in the OHL finals and they had us on the ropes. We were down three games to one, and we looked to be finished.

  Game six went to overtime. Barrie scored four straight goals in the third to force the extra frame. They were surging, and we dug deep to try to hold them off. A minute and a half into overtime, I fed a cross-ice pass over to Ryan Rupert, and he one-timed it past the Barrie goalie for the winner. As I raced toward Ryan to celebrate, I didn’t even feel like I was skating—I felt like I was flying. We’d pulled out a 5–4 win to force a seventh and deciding game. And even better, the game was going to be back in Budweiser Gardens, our home ice.

  After we won in Barrie, our hope was rekindled. We had forced a game seven, and we had a chance to win an OHL championship on home ice.

  The final game was neck-and-neck the whole way. Neither team was going down without a fight. Bo Horvat gave us a 1–0 lead in the first period, but Barrie tied it up shortly after that. We jumped ahead again in the second period, but with less than three minutes to play, the Colts tied the game.

  You could feel the air go out of our bench for a moment after Barrie scored. But we never gave up. As the seconds ticked by and the prospect of overtime loomed, we threw everything we had at the Colts. Then, with just 0.1 second left on the clock, Bo did the unthinkable and bu
ried the puck in the net before the clock ran out. The look on Bo’s face as he threw his gloves in the air and raced toward our bench was priceless—I’d never seen him that excited before. The goal was reviewed, but when the dust settled, it was ruled a good goal. We’d won 3–2 to become OHL champions for the second year in a row. Our bench emptied and piled around each other in front of our net in a giant celebration. It was easily the loudest I’d ever heard the building.

  It was just over a month before the NHL Entry Draft, and we were going back to the Memorial Cup. I thought back to the dressing room the year before and our overtime loss, and I smiled. Told you we’d be back, I thought. Unfortunately, our experience at the 2013 Memorial Cup was a step back from the year before. We won our first game, but then we lost our next two. The second one was particularly painful, as the Halifax Mooseheads blew us out 9–2.

  We made it to the tiebreaker game, which we won, putting us through to the semifinals against the Portland Winterhawks. Halfway through the second period, I scored a power play goal to put us up 1–0. All we had to do was not let up and we’d be through to the finals again! But our run through the OHL playoffs had been emotionally and physically draining, and we didn’t have any gas left in the tank. Portland came back with a fury that we couldn’t match. Only a couple of minutes after I scored, they tied the game up, and they added another goal in the third period to win the game 2–1, ending our hopes of winning the championship.

  I hated losing, and I hated even more that we’d gone all the way to the Memorial Cup two years in a row and lost both years. I told myself that there would be other opportunities, other tournaments, and other championships to win.

  But, more than anything, I told myself to hold it together—there were bigger things on the way. After all, the NHL Combine and the NHL Entry Draft were only a few weeks away.

  6 LEARN FROM FAILURE

  Just before the end of my second year in London, I felt it was time for a change. So I did what every parent fears their kid will do: I decided to get a tattoo.