SPORTS

The following is a letter the parents of Christian Turner sent out to family and friends following his injury in the Woodbury Royals boys hockey game last week against Park.

To all:

Debbie and I don’t know where to start in saying thank you for the thoughts and prayers over these last couple of days. The mixed emotions of seeing your kid laying on the ice not getting up, the hope of believing it’s simply a muscle pull of some sort and everything being done is precautionary, to the reality of something that’s more serious takes its toll.

All this said, we count our blessings that it’s no worse than what it is and in all my life I’ve never been more touched by the outpouring of love, concern, emails, phone calls, visits, etcetera…

For this, Debbie and I send our sincere thanks to all that lifted us up in prayer,
because we feel the prayers were answered.

As an update, the neurosurgeon was in today and said Christian’s broken vertebrae is a "tweener," in that he’s seen cases where they say this definitely requires surgery and others where they say this injury requires a brace only.

In Christian’s case, his injury is on the severe side of the brace-only route, but the neurosurgeon thinks it should do the trick in keeping his spine straight during the healing process. He will get a weekly x-ray and if things don’t go as planned, the surgeon said he can do the corrective surgery at that point easily enough.

So, as of now, we are excited that Christian just had his brace put on, he’s had x-rays, and we hope to be out of here late (Saturday) afternoon.

With that, we ask for continued prayers that his vertebrae does indeed heal "straight" and pray for a full, risk-free future. I apologize for individual calls or emails that I may not have gotten to during this time as it was pleasantly crazy busy with people coming in and so on.

I pray that Woodbury, East Ridge and friends we have in other communities have above all, a healthy season moving forward. An incident like this makes Debbie and I realize that hockey is truly just a game and in the big scheme of life, is secondary to the blessings of family, friends, and health.

I feel Christian has always approached the game with heart and when I see kids work hard and play with everything they have, I truly believe all our kids are winners, win or lose on the ice.

Thanks again for the support and thoughts – Merry Christmas and best wishes to all.

Greg and Debbie Turner