Thanks to . . . well, sometimes he has trouble working out, even fathoming all the thanks . . . the 23-year-old Girard still thinks of himself as a hockey player. He believes he'll play again, in the NHL, for the Bruins, resuming a life that nearly ended the morning of July 24, 2003, when he lost control of his Mitsubishi sedan and careened off a country road and into a ditch in the countryside about an hour north of Montreal.
The accident left Girard with a shattered pelvis, fractured in four places, as well as a broken right hip and another fracture high in his neck. With two pals aboard, headed to a morning workout, Girard had been the driver. The sky was blue. The road was dry. There was no rush to get to the health club and, he said, he was not speeding.
"A two-way road, out in the country, just farms all around," recalled Girard, sitting yesterday in the office of his agent, Bob Sauve, the former NHL goaltender. "The road dipped a little, no curve or anything, but I put my foot on the brake, and then . . ."
He believes what happened next was a mechanical failure in the rear brakes, specifically on the driver's side. He believes the brake shattered, forcing the wheel to seize, and sending the sedan into a spin. As it fishtailed and veered right, said Girard, he fought to regain control, but any hope of recovery ended when the front right wheel hit a gravelly soft shoulder that flipped the car off the road and into a ditch just a few feet below the road surface.
Girard's pals were generally unscathed. One of them, said Girard, sustained only a minor dislocation in his back that emergency medical workers quickly made right when they arrived. The car upside-down, the roof crushed, Girard was left sprawled across the front of the interior, his head pinned near the floor on the passenger side, his feet up against the door on the driver's side. Still conscious, he could hear his buddies outside the car, pleading with him not to move.
