'A beautiful soul': Funeral held for baby boy killed in wrong-way crash on Highway 401
A funeral was held on Wednesday for a three-month-old boy who died after being involved in a wrong-way crash on Highway 401 in Whitby last week.
As arguably the greatest women’s hockey player of all time, Hayley Wickenheiser spent two decades carving up the ice, racking up Olympic medals and handling the challenges that professional sports had to offer her.
Now her accomplishments include graduating from medical school and achieving an M.D. during a global pandemic, all while still working in player development with the Toronto Maple Leafs.
Wickenheiser, speaking to CTV News Channel on Sunday about her new book ‘Over the Boards: Lessons from the Ice’, acknowledged that it sounds like a lot when you lay it all out.
“But it’s just really the evolution of my life,” she said. “I had a long career — 23 years — in hockey, and then like most athletes, that ends and you have to figure out what you’re going to do next with your life.
“It was a very natural progression for me to go into medicine,” she added.
She said that anyone who has known her since she was “about 10 years old” would’ve known that she wanted eventually to go into medicine
“Spent as much time in the training room with the doctors and trainers as I did in the dressing room, probably,” she said.
Wickenheiser is known best for her historic run as a hockey player, achieving four Olympic gold medals with Canada’s women’s team and seven World Championship gold medals.
She was also the first woman to play full-time professional men’s hockey in a position other than goalie.
Wickenheiser officially retired from playing hockey in 2017, but she didn’t slow down from there. In 2018, she was hired as the assistant director of player development for the Toronto Maple Leafs, while also making her way through medical school.
But what she couldn’t expect was that just as her journey as a medical student was coming to an end, a huge curveball was just around the corner: COVID-19.
“Like everybody in this country and around the world, in the span of about 24 hours, 20 months ago, my life as I knew it was over,” Wickenheiser said. “I was pulled out of my last rotation as a medical student, just finishing up school, because they were worried about lack of PPE. I was working in the NHL, commuting between Calgary and Toronto for the Leafs, and that suddenly stopped, and so I found myself just sort of sitting, thinking ‘what am I going to do?’”
But giving up wasn’t an option. Wickenheiser was dedicated to continuing her career in medicine, despite having to start her residency at the height of the pandemic.
Understanding the weight of the situation, she even helped head an initiative in 2020 to try and help front-line workers across Canada get personal protective equipment.
“When we went back into the hospital for our rotations, I was coming home everyday and have a 21-year-old son who is crippled with anxiety over ‘Mom, please don’t kill Grandma and Grandpa”, because my Mom and Dad live right next door to us,” she said. “So there was that sort of fear at the start of the pandemic.”
She now works in the emergency department at a Toronto hospital, and says that the struggles she went through in her career as a hockey player helped to strengthen her for this type of stress.
When Wickenheiser first started playing hockey as a young girl in Saskatchewan, she played exclusively on boys’ teams and had to change clothes in places like the boiler room because there was no locker room for her.
“As a young kid growing up, I didn’t know any differently, so it was just like, this is what you’re going to have to endure if you want to play the game,” she said. “Now that I look back, I’m grateful for all of the adversity that I have had through my career and my life, just because I feel like I’ve developed a lot of resiliency and ability to cope with difficult things, with criticism.
“When you’re going through medicine, you hit your residency, every day you go into work, someone’s telling you something to do better or what you’re doing wrong, and if you aren’t able to handle that it can be a soul-crushing experience.”
She added that she is glad that the sport has come farther now, and that young girls no longer have the same hoops to jump through that she did.
“You can walk in a rink with a bag and a stick over your shoulder and nobody’s looking twice like they did when I played the game, so it’s come a long way,” she said.
Wickenheiser said that the high-pressure situation of a hockey game was not so different from working in the medical field.
“It’s the same kind of pressures. The stakes are much higher in the hospital for sure, when you have people’s lives in your hands, but everything I learned in sport I use every single day in the hospital,” she said.
Since the pandemic started, Wickenheiser has been promoted to senior director of player development for the Leafs, continuing to juggle her work with the team with her medical work.
Her new book detailing her journey came out earlier this week. And her current, ongoing goal? Helping to campaign for Canadians to get their shot.
“Everyone: get vaccinated, and then we’ll get through this,” she said.
It's just one more mission for this unstoppable Canadian.
A funeral was held on Wednesday for a three-month-old boy who died after being involved in a wrong-way crash on Highway 401 in Whitby last week.
There has been a "sophisticated" cybersecurity breach detected on B.C. government networks, Premier David Eby confirmed Wednesday evening.
Toronto police say a man was taken into custody outside Drake's Bridle Path mansion Wednesday afternoon after he tried to gain access to the residence.
U.S. President Joe Biden said for the first time Wednesday he would halt shipments of American weapons to Israel, which he acknowledged have been used to kill civilians in Gaza, if Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu orders a major invasion of the city of Rafah.
Dakota Joshua had a goal and two assists and the Vancouver Canucks scored three third-period goals to claw out a 5-4 comeback victory over the Edmonton Oilers in Game 1 of their second-round playoff series Wednesday.
One of the Indian nationals accused of murdering British Columbia Sikh activist Hardeep Singh Nijjar says in a social media video that he received a Canadian study permit with the help of an Indian immigration consultancy.
Pfizer has agreed to settle more than 10,000 lawsuits about cancer risks related to the now discontinued heartburn drug Zantac, Bloomberg News reported on Wednesday, citing people familiar with the deal.
Quebec Premier Francois Legault is defending his comments about a new history museum after he was accused by a prominent First Nations group of trying to erase their history.
Independent U.S. presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. had a parasite in his brain more than a decade ago, but has fully recovered, his campaign said, after the New York Times reported about the ailment.
The stakes have been set for a bet between Vancouver and Edmonton's mayors on who will win Round 2 of the Stanley Cup playoffs.
A grieving mother is hosting a helmet drive in the hopes of protecting children on Manitoba First Nations from a similar tragedy that killed her daughter.
A chicken farmer near Mattawa made an 'eggstraordinary' find Friday morning when she discovered one of her hens laid an egg close to three times the size of an average large chicken egg.
A P.E.I. lighthouse and a New Brunswick river are being honoured in a Canada Post series.
An Ontario man says he paid more than $7,700 for a luxury villa he found on a popular travel website -- but the listing was fake.
Whether passionate about Poirot or hungry for Holmes, Winnipeg mystery obsessives have had a local haunt for over 30 years in which to search out their latest page-turners.
Eighty-two-year-old Susan Neufeldt and 90-year-old Ulrich Richter are no spring chickens, but their love blossomed over the weekend with their wedding at Pine View Manor just outside of Rosthern.
Alberta Ballet's double-bill production of 'Der Wolf' and 'The Rite of Spring' marks not only its final show of the season, but the last production for twin sisters Alexandra and Jennifer Gibson.
A mother goose and her goslings caused a bit of a traffic jam on a busy stretch of the Trans-Canada Highway near Vancouver Saturday.