Craig Fitzpatrick

As a B2 in blind hockey, what I experienced out on the ice is if you were watching a movie and you could only see the very outside frame of that movie and couldn't see what was going on in the middle of the picture, you'd miss most of the action.

But between the sound and those little snippets of what you got of the film, you might be able to make out some of it.

And for anyone that has seen blind hockey before, we wear different colored helmets on the ice to designate what our vision classification is.

So B3s wear black helmets.

B2s, like me, wear white helmets on the ice.

And then if you skate out as a B1, you wear a red helmet.

Well, there's no one real point of that because both of those things were so in flux throughout the arc of when the story follows.

But we pick up my involvement in hockey around 2012, 2013.

And for those who are blind or visually impaired that are listening to this, you'll probably relate to it.

I was in the middle of a reckoning where I realized that...

The vision was gone, and so was my ability to do a lot of the things in life that depended on vision.

But I was late to adopt using a blind cane.

I was late to admit that there were things in the workplace that were going to be so much harder for me that I needed to use adaptive software to do them.

I was late to admit that there were hobbies or lifestyle choices that I should have changed that

that I was just holding on to.

And I ended up in a really dark place mentally in 2012, 2013.

There were some days that I just didn't get out of bed and taking ice skating class was a real lifeline for me.

So when you lose your vision, it takes your brain a long time to catch up to what's going on with the isolation that you feel.

And you've probably experienced this yourself, right?

Yeah.