When young Swiss hockey player Michael Fässler awoke, at first he felt nothing. He tried to move, but his body was not listening to him. He tried to speak and again there were no sounds coming out and while he was trying to look around the picture he saw was nothing like he remembered. He couldn’t know it at the time, but he had lost his three dimensional vision.

Later he would find out about the difficult operation he had gone through, the month in an induced coma and the doctor's prognosis that there was a possibility he was not going to make it.

But in those first moments of awakening there was nothing, but a terrifying understanding that he was as helpless as a six-month-old baby.

Michael remembers the doctors explaining him that his life was going to change a lot and that he had to think about what he wanted to do in the future. The first thought after hearing the doctor’s words that entered Michael’s mind was

“God, I cannot play ice hockey anymore…”

In this moment his world just crashed down around him leaving the young athlete wondering for days to come what he was going to do with his life now, when the one thing he loved more than anything was lost forever.

“My heart was beating for hockey and now it’s gone…and all doors are just closed around me,” Fässler says.

Light can be found even in the darkest of times...

Michael Fässler's story

Imagine waking up one day just to be told that you have to start your life from the scratch, that everything you had single-mindedly pursued to the exclusion of everything else is no longer possible.

Before his life took a drastic turn, Michael had his own plans and dreams where a professional ice hockey career was on the top of the list.

He started to play when he was just two and half years old and his passion for the sport grew with each year. Michael was a promising player, who had a big future ahead of him, says Kevin Schläpfer, coach of the Biel ice hockey club in Switzerland.

Fässler was the same as any high focused young athlete: hard working and determined in his wish to reach the goal - to become Swiss ice hockey champion. His life was filled with training and even more training, and only much later during his rehab period he would come to realise how blinded he was by his career to all other things around him. But at the time he had a singular obsession - professional hockey – and gave absolutely no thought to what he might do if he couldn’t play the sport.

November 10, 2008 was like any other day of Michael’s life. He went to the office, where he worked part time as an accountant, feeling only a slight headache. As day went on Michael’s headache became stronger. Not wishing to miss his evening practice, he took three aspirins to lessen the pain.

In Berne when the practice started, the team was warming up and everything went as it had thousand times before. The familiar rink was filled up with the sound of skates scraping the ice and voices of Michael’s teammates making comments about one thing or another. The freezing air surrounding the place was starting to mix with the smell of sweat as the team finished the warm up. While the coach was giving the instructions, Michael felt that something was off.

All of a sudden his left arm felt very stiff and he could not hold his stick anymore, it had just fallen out of his hand. When he reached down for it, he dropped to the ice losing the feeling in the left side of his body.

He remembers saying to his coach that he could not move and then he felt as if something has exploded in his brain. The pain was so unbearable that till this day Michael cannot find words for it. 

“There was so much pain at that moment… I cannot describe it.”

This would be his last practice, his last hockey game and it will stay with him forever as a picture of his team standing around him in circle while he was losing his consciousness lying on the ice that had always meant so much to him.

Stories abound about successful athletes and their journey to the top of their career. And when something happens to already accomplished athletes, the world will know all the details of their problems.

But rarely are the stories told of those whose careers were cut short before they could reach their full potential. No one actually wants to know the tragic story of some unknown guy who wasn’t lucky enough to make it to the top, but whose story is nonetheless dramatic and important.

We will never hear thousands of these life stories or put faces to these young athletes, who were forced to give up their career because of injuries. There are few statistics on career-ending injuries among amateur athletes, but the one out there is frightening enough. 

According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC) in the USA alone there are two million injuries among high school athletes and more than 3.5 million kids under age 14 receive medical treatment for sports injuries each year.

While not all of these injuries are serious and not all these kids were going to have career in sports, still the numbers are too high.

The Medical Centre of the University of Rochester reports that 775,000 children have sport-related injures each year, and one in four injuries is considered serious. Moreover, the severity of the sport injuries increases with age, so the closer the athlete gets to his goal the higher are the chances he will be defeated by injury.

In recent years the studies have shown disturbing head injuries data in ice hockey. According to research published in 2010 in Neurosurgical Focus, 29 per cent of the Hockey Concussion Education Project (HCEP) players suffered a concussion during the study period, which lasted 52 games. Moreover, 88 per cent of the players admitted to having at least one concussion in the past. Some of them even said that they have kept their head injuries secret so they could continue to play.

It is not hard to understand the athlete’s desire to play no matter what, but the damage from the head injuries could be unpredictable. It may seem nothing is wrong and then one day something will snap and one has to start his life again. 

“My movement returned, but just a little bit and than it was step by step back to the life…” Fässler says.

His rehabilitation was a constant struggle. He had to learn the simplest tasks such as how to eat and brash teeth by himself once again.

If everything that was happening in his life wasn’t enough, he had to face one more disappointment.

“I thought I had hundreds of friends, but there was only one person who stayed with me,” Fässler said.

His family and his friend were always there for him, even though they didn’t know how to behave around him at first.

“They didn’t know if I was a new person or if I even remembered them,” he says.

However, the familiar faces helped him not to give up.

The only thing the ex-athlete could not understand was why it happened to him. He has so many aims in his life and now all was lost. Michael was repeating just one question over and over again: “Why me?”

There are so many things that can put an abrupt end to the career in sport and it could cut to the very core of the athlete’s sense of self.

“The thing that challenges athletes the most is the fact that they have very high athletic identity,” Dr. Natascha Wesch, Performance Psychology Consultant, an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Health Science at the University of Western Ontario.

Dr. Wesh explained that even though non-athletes identify with what they do in terms of their career, it hasn’t defined them for their entire life. By contrast, high-level athletes have identified with athletics since day one.

That’s why when the athlete’s career is cut short, everything changes along with the feeling of whom they are. It can become a very difficult transition and many athletes struggle to find a new identity and their place in life.

“For a lot of athletes when everything is going well that athletic identity is very powerful and important,” Dr. Wesh says. 

“But as soon as something within that identity changes than their feeling of themselves and who they are is intertwined with the identity of an athlete and they feel they are no longer anybody.”

Dr. Wesh advises athletes to remember and recognize that sport is not who they actually are but a reflection of who they are. It’s important to develop a strong sense of identity not entirely connected with sport.  

Michael was searching for a new purpose in life and for his new identity. At some point he just stopped dwelling on what was lost and began to look at the positive side of what he might be capable of doing.

“You have to see all the stuff you can do and not to miss all the things you cannot do anymore. Make the best of all the resources you have,” says Michael. “This is the most important thing I have come to understand.”

Michael Fässler was rewarded for his strength and positive attitude.

As a part of his rehabilitation program Michael started to play wheelchair table tennis. Every evening from four to five he would go and play with other patients or his physical therapist.

One evening, Michael was playing a fierce match and the sound of the ball bouncing back and forth punctured the air. .

Ping-pong…ping-pong. 

“Suddenly there was like a blizzard in my head. I thought ‘hey you cannot earn your money with ice hockey anymore, why don’t you do the same with table tennis’?”

The decision was made and a new life began for Michael Fässler.

Dr. Natascha Wesh believes every athlete must have a plan B in case something goes wrong. However, the challenge is that so many athletes, coaches and parents are so invested in here and now that they don’t want to think about “what if” or what might go wrong.

But eventually the career will end one way or another and all athletes will face the problem of “new path” weather they want it or not.  So it’s better to be prepared for any scenario they may end up with.  She compares it to fire safety planning or any other proactive plan.

“Everybody in school learns fire safety plan. Does that mean that by practicing fare safety you are going to make a fire happen? No.  It means that in case of a fire you are ready to go.”

Michael didn’t have a plan B, but he was lucky enough to find a new passion in his life. Table tennis became his new inspiration and now he has a new life goal – to qualify for the Paralympic Games.

Since 2013 Michael has ranked number one in table tennis in Switzerland. In 2013 he had also won his first Swiss Championship title and now he described it as one of the best moments in his life.

“It was such a magic moment… My dream was to become a Swiss Champion in ice hockey and now I am here….” 

But it not the titles that are important, it is those little things he can do and those all small steps back to living his life.

“I have filled up life, I have warm feeling in my heart and all these small things are the happiness.”

Michael,

Thank you for sharing such a great story!!!