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Full story is here. It's pretty extensive but here are the cliff notes
At Death's Door: Former NHL star Lyle Odelein is a medical...
At Death's Door: Former NHL star Lyle Odelein is a medical...
In early March, Lyle Odelein was golfing with buddies in Phoenix, maintaining a whirlwind social calendar more than a decade after he’d retired from hockey.
One week later he was in the hospital. Two weeks later he was in a coma, and by the end of the month, he was at death’s door, prompting Laurel to reach out across the hockey world for prayers, even as she struggled to keep Lyle’s dire prognosis private.
“He was on so many machines that I couldn’t even touch his hands,” Laurel Odelein told The Athletic. “He was on every possible form of life support other than his heart, and that was just barely beating.
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Odelein’s aortic valve had “basically exploded,” one doctor told The Athletic. On Monday, March 26, it was determined that Odelein’s other organs were beginning to fail, too. His liver was short-circuiting, his kidneys were shutting down.
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Even among transplant doctors, who deal with emotionally charged, life-saving surgeries every day, the plan for Odelein was audacious. His body couldn’t fight much longer, and the plan was struck to do all three transplants — heart valve, then liver, then kidney — hours apart, but as part of one long surgery.
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the percentage chance given to Laurel Odelein was chilling: “Five percent,” she said before sniffing back a tear. “Five.”
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But what happened next — or what didn’t happen — might have been the most terrifying part of the entire ordeal.
Odelein couldn’t move. He couldn’t speak. Other than the ability to blink, he was paralyzed.
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Odelein was diagnosed with critical illness polyneuropathy, a nerve disease in response to severe trauma. Typically, patients with severe paralysis as a result of CIP, like Odelein, rarely make a full recovery.
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Odelein moved to a rehab facility in early June and was cleared to return home in early July.
“When we brought him home, his fight was back,” Laurel Odelein said.
By early September, he vowed to Laurel and his physical therapists that he’d be walking on his own by the end of the month.
“If anything, he was pushing the physical therapists,” Ngoc said. ” ‘I’m not ready to quit. Let’s keep going!’ ”
The first week of September he was out of the wheelchair and using a walker. Two weeks later he traded the walker for cane. On Sept. 27, Laurel Odelein began laughing during an interview with The Athletic.
“He forgot his cane when he left the house today,” she said. “So I guess he doesn’t need that anymore.”
Dr. Ngoc and others at Allegheny Medical Center are preparing a case report about Odelein’s surgeries and recovery to be published in a medical journal.
