Hooray for needles and Sharks' malaise

This is one of my favorite hockey cards, showing Owen Nolan and Ray Whitney back when both played for San Jose.

The good news is … I finally got my rhizotomy on my back! It’s not every day someone cheers about getting an IV started in a painful place and then six pokes in the back (which I of course didn’t feel, gorked out on Versed and Fentanyl and God-knows what else [there were three different meds]), but when I came to I knew the original pain was gone. The day I had the procedure, Monday March 2, was a miserable rainy day chock full of treacherous traffic in heavy rain. Naturally the rain wasn’t helping the pain one bit, but that’s what made this whole thing so remarkable—I walked out of the facility better than I walked in!

I’ve been sort of sore all week, but the pain is different than before, and getting more my “normal” kind of pain. The next thing I have to fight for with the comp carrier is for it to continue to pay for my pain medication. The comp carrier’s brilliant utilization review physician, who of course I’ve never met, thinks I shouldn’t need pain medication 20 years after the injury! WTF, he should try living through a two-level fusion and then say there is no reason to have pain! But I have faith in my back surgeon, he knows how to work the system well enough to get things done.

So the Sharks are starting their end-of-the-year slump. I had to laugh. I especially enjoy losses where one of the main characters on the opposing team are former Sharks, and that was the case with the Minnesota Wild and Owen Nolan. Owen is another of my favorite players, though I am scared to death of him. When I was writing for Hockeycorp and doing features with players like Teemu Selanne, Scott Hannan and Marco Sturm (my three all-time favorite players to interview!), Owen was still around, but had a notoriously bad attitude. After practices, media were allowed into the players’ locker room to do interviews. By the time we were let in, Owen’s gear was swinging in the breeze, and he was long gone. Hockeycorp wanted me to get Owen to sit down and do a feature on hunting, but Owen wouldn’t talk to anyone. No fun features with him!

Still, I do recall how much fun it was to go to a game when the Sharks were struggling, when a win was something to hoot and holler about, and being a female fanwank, cheering on what us girls called the “fine line,” which consisted of Owen, Ray Whitney and Jeff Friesen. Eye candy on the ice!

I guess we’ll see if Sharks coach Todd McLellan rights the ship tomorrow night against Vancouver. It’s just so much fun to read Sharks’ fan boards and how they blame the refs, blame the ice, but fail to blame the players who have obviously been reading too much positive press about how the Sharks are the team to beat. Calgary made huge moves at the trade deadline. I’m thinking they are the team to beat …