High anxiety for surgery survivor

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 03/01/2018 (3009 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

PORTAGE LA PRAIRIE — Jeff Stoughton tried to talk me out of writing this column.

He didn’t want me to tell you about how doctors at Health Sciences Centre split his chest open on an operating table in September.

He didn’t want me to tell you how 90 minutes into the surgery, those doctors stopped the procedure because they were worried Stoughton might have a stroke.

He didn’t want me to tell you how — with Stoughton still unconscious on the operating table — a cardiologist at St. Boniface Hospital rushed over to HSC to offer an opinion on whether it was safe to continue.

He didn’t want me to tell you how when the surgery resumed, doctors removed a benign growth the size of a tennis ball from his upper chest, along with a thyroid lobe and his thymus gland.

And Stoughton didn’t want me to tell you how, 5½ hours after the surgery began, doctors finally sewed him back up.

Stoughton, a three-time Brier champion skip who, these days, is the national coach for Curling Canada’s mixed doubles program, worried that me telling you this story would make him the centre of attention in a week during which 18 teams are curling here at Stride Place, competing for the opportunity to become the first team to represent Canada in mixed doubles curling at next month’s Winter Olympics in South Korea.

Stoughton also worried about making his story into something it’s not, and taking away from the valiant struggles Manitobans are waging with far more serious health conditions.

Yes, Stoughton got a terrible scare last fall, but in the end it was nothing — a goiter that he probably had in his body for decades that became a problem only because it had grown so large.

He got lucky, in other words. Really lucky.

But against all his better judgment, he agreed to tell the story.

Because what Stoughton didn’t mind me telling you is how eternally grateful he is — to his family and to his doctors, of course — but mostly for that most precious of opportunities in life: a second chance he wasn’t sure a couple months ago was ever going to come.

“I don’t think lucky is the right word. I just feel very fortunate,” he told me.

“The first diagnosis I received was that they really didn’t know what it was. Basically the range I got was that it could be nothing at all or I could be in the grave in six months.

“I was really worried that this was not going to turn out good. You’re not sleeping, you wake up in the middle of the night and you’re thinking it’s something bad. You just exhaust yourself because you’re putting up this facade for the people around you that everything is OK.

“I was scared. And so, for it to all turn out so well, I just feel really, really fortunate.”

Stoughton, of course, was always at his best as a curler when the pressure was greatest. He retired from curling in 2015 after a record-setting career that saw him appear as a skip in 12 Manitoba men’s finals, winning 11 of them.

Of course, it’s one thing to need a piece of the four-foot with the last rock of the game to send your team to the Brier and quite another to lie awake in bed at night wondering whether you should be putting your affairs in order.

But pressure is pressure, wherever it comes from. And with his health crisis now behind him — he’s gotten a clean bill of health from doctors — Stoughton is now under pressure of a very different kind as the man in charge of Canada’s nascent mixed doubles curling program.

Canadians have absurdly high expectations of our curlers internationally, with anything less than gold considered a disappointment.

Some of that is grounded in past performance. Canadian men have won the last three golds at the Winter Olympics and lead by a mile at the world championships, where Canada has taken down 36 titles since 1959. (The Swedes are second with — LOL — seven.)

Canadian women have been almost as dominant internationally. Although Jennifer Jones won the country’s first women’s Olympic curling title — in Sochi — since Sandra Schmirler struck gold in Nagano in 1998, Canadian women have won a record 16 world titles since the the event was first contested in 1979. (The Swedes are second, with eight.)

So if our men and women curlers have been so dominant internationally, it just stands to reason that if you put together a curling team consisting of one of each they should also kick butt, right?

Well, no.

Canada has not only never won a world mixed doubles championship, we’ve medalled just twice in the 10-year history of the obscure event — a bronze in 2009 and a silver last year by a team consisting of Winnipeg skip Reid Carruthers and teammate Joanne Courtney, the second for Rachel Homan’s Ottawa foursome.

An all-time best performance in mixed doubles for Canada in 2017, a year before the Winter Olympics, suggests Stoughton finally has Canada’s program pointed in the right direction and peaking at exactly the right time.

Still, talk to Stoughton a while and he makes clear Curling Canada would be delighted with an Olympic medal of any kind next month in mixed doubles, a full medal event in Pyeongchang for the first time.

“If we get on the podium in Korea, that would be fantastic,” he said. “That’s our goal. Anything after that would be gravy.”

But he also knows the folks back home won’t see it that way. As most Canadians see it, curling is curling is curling and anything less than gold next month — in men’s, women’s and mixed doubles — is going to earn some sideways glances in these parts.

And so, three years after he retired as a curler and less than six months since he faced his biggest challenge of all on an operating table, Stoughton says he’s feeling the pressure all over again this week, waiting to find out who’ll be wearing the Maple Leaf in the Olympic debut of mixed doubles curling next month.

“Mixed doubles is just so much more of a crapshoot. People are still figuring out how to play the game,” Stoughton said. “So yeah, absolutely, I’m feeling the pressure. And it’s a different kind of pressure, too.

“As a player, I’d feel the pressure but I’d go out on the ice and be able to relax. But with this, I feel in control before the game, but once the team is on the ice is when I really feel it. Because I can’t do anything about it then.”

It is a default setting for a guy such as Stoughton that he’s always at his most calm when he’s in control.

Give him the last rock during a 30-year curling career and he would coolly deposit it on the four-foot, every single time.

But put that rock — or the scalpel — in someone else’s hands and he’s a nervous wreck.

For 5-1/2 hours last fall, Stoughton lay helpless on an operating table, his life quite literally in someone else’s hands.

It was the most important last rock he never threw. South Korea will be kid’s stuff compared to that.

email: paul.wiecek@freepress.mb.caTwitter: @PaulWiecek