In the wake of some trying times for the Chicago Blackhawks — a team who is facing two nasty lawsuits stemming from allegations 2010 video coach Brad Aldrich sexually abused two players and the Blackhawks knew about it and failed to report it — some good news came to Blackhawks fans. Team captain Jonathan Toews revealed he was returning to the team and would be back for the 2021-22 NHL season.
Toews revealed he was dealing with Chronic Immune Response Syndrome. In easier to understand terms, it was an immune issue that just consistently wiped him out and he couldn’t recover. He’s not a fan of using the word COVID as a descriptor, but he’s acknowledging that it’s certainly possible he was one of the few people where COVID was long-lasting in his system and he just couldn’t shake it.
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The good news is he’s back, he was skating and working with the team and he looks good.
In trying to describe what having the illness was like, he told Mark Lazerus of The Athletic:
He was lethargic. He was fatigued. He’d wake up in the morning and take a sip of water and his stomach would immediately bloat. His arms and legs felt like lead weights. His breathing was labored. His sinuses were stuffy. He’d have days when he could barely get out of bed. His digestion was off. His immune system was triggering, working to put out flames that didn’t seem to exist. Then he’d string together a couple of good days and excitedly hit the gym or the ice, only to be back at square one the next day. He left Chicago and holed up somewhere mostly alone — he won’t say where — for months on end, cutting himself off from his team, from his teammates, from his fans, from his life as he tried to find what was wrong and fix it.
The Timing Of The Toews Return News
Toews does know the timing on his announcement seems convenient. It’s good for the organization to have such ideal news to share about their captain in the face of such bad news floating around the team. That said, he wants to make clear this announcement, and the video that came with it, was not an organizational decision, It was his.
Toews says he’s been on the ice for a little while now and has been working on this release video and the story of his return for some time. It’s just unfortunate (or fortunate) that the two stories are out there around the same time. As Mario Tirabassi put it on Twitter, “Being happy to see Jonathan Toews healthy and back skating with the team can be a completely separate emotion from being disgusted about the Blackhawks as an organization. Both can happen at the same time.”
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