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Zednik upgraded to good condition after neck injury

NHL forward Richard Zednik's condition was upgraded to good on Tuesday and doctors planned to take him out of an intensive-care unit in a Buffalo hospital following his gruesome neck injury.

Zednik's carotid artery was nearly severed by a Florida Panthers teammate's skate but he isn't believed to have suffered any long-term brain or nerve damage, and one surgeon described the Slovakian as "very lucky."

"It's a sign of how good medicine can be and how good medical people can be," Panthers coach Jacques Martin said.

Zednik was critically injured on Sunday in a game against the Buffalo Sabres. Teammate Olli Jokinen was upended and his razor-sharp skate blade pierced Zednik's neck, opening a deep gash that stopped just shy of the 32-year-old's jugular vein.

A significant amount of blood immediately began pouring from the 4cm wound, leaving a wide, ghastly red trail on the ice as Zednik skated to the Panthers' bench, desperate for help. His carotid artery -- which pumps blood to the brain -- was cut, and emergency surgery that night at Buffalo General Hospital probably saved his life.

"It's hard to say what would have happened under other circumstances, but clearly, the care he got initially by the staff at the arena, I think, saved his life," said Robert McCormack, the hospital's clinical chief of emergency medicine.

The Panthers agreed.

"Shows how tough the guy is," Jokinen said. "He was able to skate to the bench, with the cut in his throat, losing blood like that. It was pretty amazing, you know?"

Zednik never lost consciousness. He actually complained that Sabres' orthopedic surgeon Les Bisson was applying too much pressure to his neck in an effort to stop the bleeding.

By the time he reached the hospital, Zednik needed five units (roughly 2.4 liters) of blood, a figure that suggests one-third of the blood in his body gushed from the wound before bleeding could be controlled.

And by all accounts, his recovery was going as well as could be expected.

Soon after Sonya Noor checked in on Zednik a day after stitching him back together, the Panthers' forward already had a question.

"He actually asked me when he could go back to training?" the vascular surgeon said with a smile. "And I said, `Next season.'"

But that's a far better prognosis than the one many feared a day earlier, when Zednik raced off the ice.

"He looks very good. He's alert, awake, oriented. He remembers what happened last night. ... He's right on target," said Noor, who performed the one-hour surgery. "He's with his wife upstairs. They're talking, and we're just very, very happy. We were all lucky last night, not just Richard."

Doctors were astonished the skate blade did not hit any other arteries or veins, including the jugular, or cause any major nerve damage. It also helped that the artery was not entirely severed -- "It was hanging by a thread," Noor said.

That lessened the time it took for the carotid to be clamped as it was reattached, and decreased the chances of brain damage.
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