And now she [Katia] was considering how a teenage boy, a patient at the Montreal General 11 months ago during her then-fiancé’s hospitalization with a fractured vertebra and severe concussion, had forever changed the Paciorettys’ outlook on life. “He’d been in a coma for three weeks,” Katia said of the teen, who had been critically injured in a car accident. “His parents believed he wasn’t going to walk or talk again. And then he woke up. I think it was a miracle. “Max and I were in a lounge when the boy’s father came in and said, ‘You’re Max Pacioretty. My son’s just come out of a coma, can you come and meet him?’ ”“He couldn’t talk, he was connected to the biggest tube,” Katia recalled of the teen. “He’d just awakened from a coma and now we walk in. Max put all the stuff on the bed and said, ‘Hey, buddy, I’m Max Pacioretty.’ “The boy opened his eyes and just said, ‘Oh, crap.’ Everyone started crying – nurses, his parents, us. It was amazing.” But Pacioretty would truly be stunned eight months later, at the Canadiens’ annual blood-donor clinic at Windsor Station. “The boy from the hospital came (walking into) the clinic wearing a Pacioretty jersey,” Max said, picking up the story upon his arrival in the arena’s wives’ lounge. “I was almost in a fog. I couldn’t believe it. It was something that people make movies about.”
This made me cry.