Matt MacKenzie is a defenseman on the Rochester Americans roster that only played 15 games up until his nasty injury on December 3rd against the Hamilton Bulldogs in which he had his leg cut wide open.  Lisa McRitchie who writes for the Oil Patch on Kukla’s Korner recently caught up with MacKenzie and wrote the following below.  He’s expecting to be back on the ice in a couple of weeks and will slowly work towards getting back into game shape.
Sadly, this was not a simple nostalgic trip to Calgary. Instead, Mackenzie has been recovering from a laceration to his quad suffered in a game in Hamilton on December 3rd.
“It was just a weird play,†Mackenzie said of the injury. “We both fell and I didn’t know that I had fallen on his skate at first. We fell and my whole leg went numb so I knew that something was wrong.
“I went to the bench and I saw the blood on my socks and I got rushed to the trainer’s room. I went right to hospital. They looked at me and did a surgery. They did another surgery when I got back to Rochester.
“Five weeks of doing pretty much doing nothing but healing on crutches. So this is the first week of being able to walk.â€
It was a scary injury from the start for Mackenzie. No one knew at the time just how sever the injury was. “I was on the trainer’s bed and I was taking off all of my gear. I didn’t know what I was going to see and [then] seeing this huge deep gash, it was a little scary.
“Not knowing what was going on if it was something to do with my knee or my hamstring but apparently where it cut was probably one of the better spots around where it was for time wise or else I could have been out for the year.â€
Mackenzie was able to smile as those with weaker stomachs cringed at the description of the cut and subsequent surgery. Having just seen so many images and videos of Taylor Hall’s brush with a skate blade imagining a deeply wounded leg was a little too easily done.
There’s a lot of other great info about MacKenzie’s move from a junior to pro career, read it on over at Kukla’s Korner.
