Back in June, Jake Thibeault, the Milton Academy hockey player who suffered a spinal cord injury in September 2021 that left him paralyzed from the waist down, joined an episode of the hockey podcast Spittin’ Chiclets. The conversation ranged from talking about graduation parties to walking — with the help of a walker — across the stage for his high school diploma to becoming friends with Mark Wahlberg.
Towards the end of the conversation, it turned toward how his injury impacted his parents.
“Not to go back to the day,” Thibeault told Spittin’ Chiclets, “but my dad was right on the glass where I hit the end wall. It’s stuck with him.”
The shockwave from those 25 words was felt about 500 miles away from where Thibeault recorded the interview at his home in Fitchburg, Mass.