I hope you don't mind if I continue this discussion for one more entry. But the thing with Rob DiMaio was how together he always seemed when you spoke to him, even when his symptoms were supposed to be at their worst. He spoke clearly and put sentences together easily. At least it seemed that way.

The reason I mention it is because he was so different from Petr Svoboda. The Lightning defenseman's career was ended by a concussion when he took a stick across the nose in a game in Phoenix in December 2000. That injury didn't look like much at the time but Svoboda was badly hurt. I interviewed him the next April and he still had lots of trouble speaking clearly, forming sentences and keeping focused on the conversation. But DiMaio never seemed that way to me. Perhaps that is part of the reason why he is so frustrated at what he is going through.