Andrej Nestrašil

The following text is an authentic, unedited memory of Andrej Nestrasil on the 10th anniversary of his severe spinal injury.

February 25th 2026. This date marks 10 years to the day that my life took a turn. It was 2016, I was playing in the NHL for the Carolina Hurricanes, at the Scotiabank center against the Toronto Maple Leafs, the Mecca of hockey, when life decided to set me on a different path.

I was on top of the world, 25 years old, having a great season establishing myself in the NHL probably looking at a new 2-3 year deal worth millions of dollars.

But in the second period that night it all changed. I was beating my guy coming around the net and just when I thought I had him, another guy came into the battle and caught me off guard with my head down.

I landed with my back against the boards and lost my breath. Raised the old school way, I heard my dad in my head saying…”if you’re not dead, you get up and skate off the ice by yourself”. I tried and with a bit of help I walked to the locker room and laid down on a table. 20 minutes later the adrenaline left my body and the pain started to set in. I couldn’t breath properly, I felt like my whole core was in a spasm and my trainers didn’t really know what to do with me. Eventually they told me to take my time, the third period was about to start so I could go shower and get changed.

I tried to get off the table and get down on my feet but I couldn’t hold myself up, so I waited another ten minutes and tried again. My teammate, a guy I really looked up to, Nathan Gerbe didn’t play that night and decided to help me shower, dry me up and even helped me with my underwear…thanks Gerbs.

It was then when the Toronto doctor decided to come in and take me for an xray that they had in the facility, just to make sure nothing was structurally wrong. After the xray I was put on a stretcher, given some pills and ordered not to move anymore. The doctor didn’t really tell me what’s wrong but said I need to go to the hospital for a CT scan and MRI. Darren York, our assistant GM, stayed behind with me as we headed to the hospital and the guys got on a plane back to Raleigh.

I didn’t know why, but the nurse came in telling me the CT scan is ready and asked if I needed help getting there in a wheel chair. A Hockey guy in a wheel chair, can you imagine? No thank you, I’m gonna walk there by myself if you don’t mind. On my way I was wobbling down the hallway.

The result? 2 broken vertebrae, L2 and L3 fractures. L2 was your ‘usual’ compression fracture that happens in a lot of sports and wasn’t really a concern.

L3 was what’s called a chance fracture. Instead of explaining what it is I’m just gonna use the description I found online.

A Chance fracture is an unstable, horizontal spinal injury commonly caused by extreme flexion-distraction, often termed a "seatbelt fracture" from high-speed motor vehicle accidents

The rest of the night I had doctors and nurses coming in poking me with needles to see if I could feel my legs properly. I could see the doctors didn’t really know which direction to go with me. The next day, still being in a horizontal position, I got the MRI. The doctors ended up deciding not to move forward with a surgery (thank god) and released me in a brace so I could figure things out in Raleigh.

Darren was there for me and helped me get back to Raleigh.

I was rooming with another patient who was clearly in so much pain the whole night and I remember being grateful to be in my situation rather than his. What’s strange is that the whole time I was in the hospital I had no doubt that I’m fine and I’ll be back to playing in no time. I had no emotional reaction and I was just trying to do the math to figure out how much time I had to prepare for the next season. I CLEARLY didn’t have a clue how my life was going to change from that day forward.

The first doctor I visited in Raleigh told me that he would likely need to put screws in my back; 2 below and 2 above the injury, resulting in 6 total vertebrae that would be screwed together. That didn’t sound promising so I opted for a second opinion. My then girlfriend, and now wife and mother to our 3 kids, worked at Duke hospital (for Czech people, this is one of the top schools and hospitals in the country) and connected me with a spine specialist which had a much more optimistic view for my situation. He had me get a 3D scanned brace for my upper body and gave me instruction’s to come in every three weeks for an Xray to see if the L3 was healing properly. If so, we wouldn’t need to do any surgery - which sounded much more promising to me.

Thats where my new journey began.

As I mentioned, I had no clue how severe the injury was and how much my life was going to  change. Little did I know, the next 3 years were going to be the most miserable years of my life. Healing the fracture was one hurdle, but the repercussions that injury had on my body as a whole was something I didn’t expect and no one else around me did either. In that time period I was in so much pain that it was so hard for the people closest to me to be AROUND me. In retrospect I have no idea why my now wife stayed with me through that time. I guess she really loves me. My parents were definitely worried about me because they could feel how different I became. I was always in a bad mood, snappy, no energy, and negative.

The first summer was somewhat ok, Patrick Chasse, who, at the time worked at Duke as a PT helped with a ton at the beginning and I was also able to use Duke facilities for recovery. Treadmill in the pool and high tech recovery tools like that. I got to training camp and my results weren’t as good as the previous year but I didn’t wanna lose my spot in the line up that I fought so hard to get for years. I was going to be selected for the World Cup of hockey and make my comeback in Scotiabank arena. That would be an incredible story. Carolina was against it and asked me not to go and I complied.

I remember Ron Francis coming down to the locker room and talking to me. Telling me I can take my time if I need to or at least start in a yellow (no contact) jersey. In my mind I had already done what I could to get back and no one was coming to me with ideas how to get better, they were only coming to me with the words “take your time”. Maybe if someone would have come to me at that time and said, hey I have these great people who worked with injuries like yours, maybe go there for couple months and then come back, maybe I would have. But it was such an uncommon injury in hockey that no one really knew how to help me at the time.

I don’t say this to blame anyone else, as I believe that everyone was trying to do the best for me given the available knowledge and the circumstances. I loved Ron Francis and I appreciated that he was going to give me more time. Unfortunately my bigger problems from the injury didn’t start showing yet, so I really thought I was ready for the start of the season and I knew that the NHL is a business first and foremost and no one is going to wait for me for too long. I was on the last year of my contract and I didn’t want to lose my spot on a line with Joakim Nordstrom and Jordan Staal. We had a great season the previous year and I wasn’t going to let my spot go to someone else and allow anyone to take it from me.

Everything changed with the first exhibition game that year. We played in Minnesota against the Wild. I felt great. I was back. Or so I thought, until the next morning when  I woke up and I felt like truck ran over me.

Over the next three years, that’s how I would feel most of the time. I was constantly tired, I was sweating just laying down, I couldn’t eat, I felt like I couldn’t digest any food, I was irritated, my stomach was so sour that I didn’t have any appetite, it was burning, I couldn’t go to the bathroom for days and then when I went it was yellow, all of my muscles especially my legs were burning 24/7, I couldn’t stand for more then 20-30 minutes without severe pain, I couldn’t sit for more then 20-30 minutes without severe pain, I couldn’t recover properly and I constatly felt like I just finished a game even tho we just had days off. Imagine your coach putting you though  mountain climbers to punish you for something , how your legs feel at the end of that segment. Thats how my legs felt every day without doing anything. It was beyond frustrating. Back then, I felt that way 25 days out of a month and then sometimes something would happen and I would feel better. But I couldn’t figure out what or why it was happening. That’s why it was the toughest three years of my life, losing an NHL job was tough but to live your life not knowing if you’re gonna wake up feeling at 5 percent, 25 percent, 60 percent. The uncertainty was mentally killing me. Most of those days I was just surviving and not really living. And for critics who might suggest that we are all tired sometimes - trust me, I understand the degrees of tired. I am a full time dad and still a professional hockey player at 35 years old, Im waking up with kids in the middle of the night and playing back to back games, and it is still is bliss compared to the state I was in back then after my injury.

This is not supposed to be a negative story or a story of me complaining about my situation back then. I want this to be a story that could inspire someone who’s in the same position as I was and say that no matter how bad you feel and no matter how many times you fail, keep looking for options and keep looking for answers. It will workout one day, maybe not in a week, maybe not in a month, maybe not in a year - for me it took 3 years but I found my way.

I ultimately lost my job in the NHL and finished the year in the AHL with the Checkers. The coaching staff, Ulf Samuelson was great and tried his best to help me but it wasn’t really the help I needed. I left North America and spent the next two years in Russia. I made some money which was great but my body was getting worse and worse due to the type of training we were put through there.

During these three years I visited so many chiropractors, PTs, doctors. Some helped giive me relief for a couple days, then the pain came back immediately, some didn’t help at all, some made it worse, some doctors thought I had gallbladder attacks, I went through an endoscopy where they shove a pipe with camera down your throat into your stomach and take samples, I tried homeopathic medicine, I remember flying to Manhattan to see a famous PT for 2 sessions that cost me 900 dollars and a NFL player was the appointment before me and Milos Raonic (4th ranked tennis player in the world at the time) was the appointment after me. None of that really helped. Then I discovered that alcohol would sometimes help, I didn’t know it at the time but alcohol can restore tension in the muscles, so it would give me a short relieve but never for more then couple days. I was never a big drinker but during that period I started drinking more beer because it was helping me physically and sometimes mentally so I could just relax my brain for a second. But I knew long term that that wasn’t the answer.

At the end of the 2019 season I had enough of all of that, I was discouraged, I felt terrible and my body looked even worse. That’s when I made the best decision of my life. I declined to join the national team, I told my agent to not look for new contracts and instead, I decided that I was going to spend the summer with the best strength and conditioning coach in the world when it comes to hockey and if they wouldn’t be able to help me then I decided I would be done with hockey.

I had two people in mind, Gary Roberts and Andy O’Brien. We left for the US to visit my wife’s family in Michigan which is only 4 hour car ride from Toronto where they both have their facilities. Through my agent I got in touch with Andy, he was great and willing to take me on board but for some reason my gut feeling was telling me to go with Gary Roberts. The problem was, he wasn’t returning my calls and it was getting close to June, I needed to decide. A couple of days before I was going to get on the road to Toronto, Gary finally called me back. I talked to him on the phone, I told him my story hoping he would be willing to take me. Gary had vertabrea surgery and a long recovery himself so he probably felt some kind of empathy for me and told me I can come join them.

I jumped in the car and drove to Toronto not knowing where his facility was, no hotel, no plan whatsoever, only knowing the address and the date I was supposed to start. I was so excited.

That’s where the page started to turn. I’ve done physical testing, bloodwork, stool test, really tried to pick everyone’s brain. They told me they have to break me down and build me back up, I was up for it, I had met the most professional and knowledgeable team led by Gary but it wasn’t just him, it was Adrian, Lucas and Brian who were in charge of the programming in the gym and on the field and Sylvie who was in charge of health and nutrition. Not only that but I got to workout with players like Connor McDavid, Matthew Tkachuk, Steven Stamkos and another 15-20 NHL guys on daily basis. I would get there early for brekfast, then workout, then ice, then treatment. Some days I would be there 7am till 2pm. One of the first big breakthroughs I had there was during a PT session. During needling with electric stim they found out that pretty much the whole left side of my core is completely shut and atrophied since the injury. Laying for 3 months in a brace, I had lost all the core muscles and they weren’t firing properly, especially one that I’ve never heard of before called the PSOAS muscle. For some reason, after the injury, every time I’d try to play, my body would try to protect itself and all of the core muscles around the injury would spasm and stop working, they’d protect the injured vertebrae but they were so weak and tight I couldn’t move my legs. I started to discover how connected the body really is and how one muscle can have such a huge effect on your system. So Gary hired a Pilates instructor who would work with me personally 2-3 times a week on simple movements that would engage the little muscles I didn’t know I have and had neglected for years at that point. I started from scratch and had to build them back up. It didn’t get better overnight and I still deal with psoas almost all the time, but I’ve learned how to release it properly and how to take care of it.

That was step one.

Then, because I had spent a lot of time in a car that summer I really got interested in podcasts and came across a podcast with Dr. Steve Gundry. He was talking about symptoms of a specific condition and I started crying because it described my digestive issues to a T. It’s called a leaky gut. Leaky gut is a condition where damage to the small intestine lining allows substances like toxins and undigested food to pass into the bloodstream, potentially triggering inflammation. I got to work with Sylvie and figured out what’s wrong with my diet, supplementation and she taught me about fasting which was life changing.

That was step two.

Strength and conditioning was step three.

Eccentrics, isometrics, propulsive weren’t really terms that I knew at the time. I’m not going to bore you with each one of those does for you, but with my core working properly again, connecting the major muscles from the upper body to the lower body and from rotations left to right, I was able to get so much stronger.

So on the days that I didn’t feel great I knew I’m not going to suffer and I’m going to power through with strength. It wasn’t ideal YET. But it was a start and it was something I could hold onto, that I was improving.

It was truly such a great experience that I work with GRHPT till this day.

At that point, I decided that I was ready to go back to hockey in September and play. After playing in Trinec two games I signed in Russia for two more years and continued working on my issues.

I wasn’t 100 percent recovered, but instead of 25 bad days and 5 good days, I was at 15 good days and 15 bad/recovery days and improving. We had a Chinese guy who couldn’t speak English/russian or Czech and I couldn’t speak mandarin but somehow it worked for us and he would do dry needling for me on those recovery days while playing harmonica and singing in his native language, I kid you not.

In 2021 I signed a 5 year deal in Třinec. The best organization in the Czech league, excited to finally be back home but with the start of the season lot of my symptoms were coming back, I learned how to defeat the psoas, eat better, fast, workout properly but when I would finally get over the psoas, something else would pop up, I felt like I was continuously putting out fires and when I succeeded with one thing, then there was another fire somewhere else.

I still had the digestive issues in a sense that I felt like I always have food in my throat and I wouldn’t go to the bathroom regularly and I knew something is off in that department despite making progress in so many other ways. I had a great PT in Prague (not gonna name, he wouldn’t be happy if I did) that had helped me before but driving back and forth every couple weeks wasn’t realistic. I came home after one game sat on the corner of the bed and told my wife with tears in my eyes that I don’t think I can do it anymore that I’m done, I was in pain again and couldn’t find a way out. But after a little pitty party for myself, once again I had to put myself out there, look for answers, figure it out and not get complacent. Luckily this time I wasn’t looking for answers for too long, my teammate suggested a PT in the region, which was great because I was willing to try anything - so I begged to get an appointment as soon as possible.

Sometimes the best people don’t have to be in Manhattan or LA, sometimes a humble person with a small practice that wants to help regular people just for the love of the profession is the best person out there. That’s where my life turned from 15 good days and 15 bad days to 27 good days and 3 bad days. My Diaphragm was the biggest issue in my life and even with all the help I had, it still took 5 years to figure out.

The diaphragm is the primary breathing muscle that contracts to pull air into the lungs and relaxes to push it out, attaches to the ribs, spine, and sternum, and also helps regulate abdominal pressure and certain bodily functions. Plus, the esophagus goes through a tiny hole in your diaphragm and if your diaphragm spasms and is stuck - then the only way for food to get to your stomach is blocked. You can’t breathe properly and can’t rest properly. Learning how to release my diaphragm was a revelation. My life got 100 times better. Digestion, appetite, food intake, regular bathroom times. Proper digestion and properly functioning gut is step one to happiness, 90 percent of serotonin (happiness hormone) is created there. The gut brain connection is really unbelievable.

I am not going to get into too much detail here but the diaphragm is connected closely with your pelvic floor. I needed to get that figured out right after as well and they can only do it through your rectum. ANYWAY.

I am 35 years old now and I feel like I am in the best shape of my life, I still have some bad days here and there but now I stay calm because through the process of educating myself over the past 10 years I’ve learned that I have the capability to deal with it. I surrounded myself with the best people I could have found over the years, and I am grateful everyday for these people in my life. I am grateful that my wife stuck with me through the bad years and now we have a beautiful family. One of my biggest concerns back in the day was, how am I going to play with the kids? What if they’re going to want to ride on my shoulders? That gave me nightmares back then. Today I rotate 3 kids on my shoulders with ease and I am greatful for that as well. I have a great dad who instilled in me that problems are there to be solved. A great mom who loves me unconditionally and 3 brothers who are my biggest supporters through thick or thin. I was able to win three championships in a row with my team playing some heavy minutes every step of the way thanks to the help of all these people mentioned above and I believe I have some really good years still ahead of me before I hang it up.

I am writing this for two reasons.

One. I rarely share my feelings with anyone about anything and it’s been ten years of thoughts stuck in my head, and I finally feel like I’ve earned it to share this story after 10 years of hard work.

Two. I see a lot of people in life stuck in their problems. It could be physical health or mental health, it doesn’t matter what kind.

Some of those you can’t get rid of, but I feel like 90 percent of people could at the very least, improve. They could look for solutions, look for answers, not get complacent. Don’t ever think that you have it all figured out or that there is no way out. A lot of people get worse and worse to a point that they don’t even remember what “good” feels like. I got to a point where I can notice a slight change in my body immediately. I have received a lot of ridicule over the years, and have had to deal with people telling me my issues were psychosomatic, that im always dealing with something. But the bottom line is that I am happy, I don’t care what people think and the fact that over the past 7 years I’ve missed only maybe ten games is proof to me that I’m doing something right. If there is anyone who’s going to read this and it will inspire them to go outside for a walk for his mental health or go to the gym to improve his physical health, then I’ll be grateful for that, these go hand in hand. Or maybe someone has similar symptoms to mine and will try to look for answers now.

I try to educate myself every day and surround myself with positive people. I know there’s going be some bad days ahead of me but no matter what, I’m going to look for the answers.