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OTTAWA — In our endless sports dialogue we toss around phrases like “life and death,” “state of emergency” and “crisis management.” 

Families know the real meaning of these words.

Ottawa Senators winger David Perron and his wife, Vanessa Vandal, have learned more about the priorities of family and hockey over the past eight months than they care to know. This week, Perron spoke to Sportsnet.ca at length about how his family was blindsided by a life-threatening crisis involving their baby they hadn’t even met. 

In the calm aftermath, Perron says he now “knows too much” about prenatal care and delicate surgeries. A father knows best, we used to say. This father could have been excused for feeling overwhelmed by a health-care emergency of his unborn daughter but stepped up in the clutch for his partner, as he once did on the ice to help bring a Stanley Cup to the 2019 St. Louis Blues. Now, he dreams of doing likewise with the upstart Senators. 

As she shared during one of her star turns on the TV series Hockey Wives, Vanessa met David in Sherbrooke, Que., during the NHL lockout of 2012-13. 

“On our first date, we ended up talking in a parking lot until 4 in the morning,” Vanessa said. “Six months later, I was with him in St. Louis.”

Perron, a big scorer with Lewiston of the QMJHL, was the 26th-overall pick of the Blues in 2007, the year of Ottawa’s run to the Cup final.

Fast-track to 17 years later: Perron, Vanessa and their growing family had not yet settled in Ottawa after Perron was signed by the Senators as a free agent on July 1, 2024.  

At home in Sherbrooke, Vanessa was cruising through her fourth pregnancy when something felt amiss. It was mid-August, and Vanessa was approaching her seventh month. Her contractions felt just a bit “off” and, as a precaution, the Perrons went to the emergency ward of the Sherbrooke hospital. 

“Clearly the instincts of a mother,” Perron says. “A gut feeling.”

The news was stunning. Their unborn daughter had a growth on the outside of her right lung, a mass that was putting pressure on her little heart. If left unchecked, it could cause a fatal heart attack. Doctors spoke of in vitro surgery and a visit to a Toronto hospital. With another significant surgery to follow, after the birth. 

For Perron, it must have felt like one of those myriad Netflix series where the doctor speaks of a frightening diagnosis and your mind races, no longer hearing the words. 

“From that point on, it just was just a world where they put us in a spin cycle, where we had to constantly re-adjust on the go,” Perron says. 

Emotions were raw. Tears were shed. Vanessa was “devastated” with worry over the risks, Perron says. What was the worst-case scenario? What kind of life could this baby girl face, if she survived, minus a lung or worse?

“It got to both of us at times, where you’re kind of getting on each other’s nerves, and that’s putting it nicely, probably,” he says, laughing. 

“I was trying to manage my emotions, too, but not showing it,” Perron says. “I was trying to be, like — let’s not think about what can happen in a week. Let’s think of today. My wife was caught up in the big picture and I was trying to be the hockey coach and narrow it down to the small things you can worry about.”

One of the first steps was processing the news that a fetal surgery could be done, at Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto, which has a strong thoracic surgery program. 

The exact condition and procedure? Brace for it: a large, macrocystic congenital cystic adenomatoid malformation (CCAM) of the lung, for which a fetal thoracoamniotic shunt (TAS) is used to drain fluid from the cyst, reducing its size and potentially improving fetal outcomes. 

Perron says they were told the condition affects about one in 10,000 fetuses and is not related to genetics. 

The procedure is designed to reduce the mass, which gives the fetus a chance to reach full term. Only a chance. These types of interventions often trigger a premature birth. The due date was not until late October, so if the procedure put Vanessa into labour, the baby faced further risks by coming into the world two and a half months early. 

The Perrons expected to be in Toronto for a day or two. Instead, Vanessa was in hospital for a week. Following the successful fetal surgery in August, the Perrons lived with the fear that at any moment they might have to rush to hospital for an emergency C-section. There were checkups two to three times per week at Ottawa General Hospital and the Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario. 

Agonizingly slowly, the weeks passed. But pass they did. 

“One of the small miracles that happened, once that in vitro procedure worked, she was able to bring the baby to full term,” Perron says. “That lets the baby develop all her organs better. The other lung was fine. We needed that (healthy) lung to develop as fully as possible.”

Vanessa and David had settled on the name Elizabeth on the way to Mount Sinai for the shunt procedure in August.

“I needed her to be real before risking losing her,” Vanessa said, in a later post on Instagram. 

Once born, on Oct. 27, baby Elizabeth underwent major surgery at CHEO to remove the mass on her lung. The care the family received went above and beyond. The first time Vanessa met one of the CHEO specialists, they both — doctor and mother — shed tears together. 

“I was just standing to the side,” Perron says. “I couldn’t believe it, for the doctor to be that invested in our case when she’s seeing probably 10 or more cases in a day.”

Five months later, baby Elizabeth is as pretty as her portrait. Healthy and getting stronger. The Perrons are finally able to feel settled in their new city of Ottawa, enjoying its bilingual flavour. 

“She’s great,” Perron says of his daughter, the youngest sibling to Mason, 9, Victoria, 7, and Sophia, 2. Lightly, Perron taps the wood of the bench on which he sits, in a meeting room across from the Senators dressing room. 

“I knock on wood every time I say that. But she’s clear of everything they looked at. All the testing of the mass and all this stuff she’s had to go through, including the surgery. Just the other day, my wife and I were looking at her scar and it’s fading away more and more. 

“As the days go by, we can’t believe it, to be honest,” Perron adds. “It’s surreal that, since we had that tough news in the middle of August — an in vitro surgery to be followed by an emergency surgery at birth — everything has been very positive. We’re extremely lucky and grateful. Over the last couple of months, she’s started to smile and interact with us.”

The Perrons have been told that Elizabeth is going to have a normal, active life. Surgeons were able to save a good part of the affected lung. 

“These are special people,” Perron says of the health care providers at CHEO.

Vanessa posted the news on Elizabeth: “she’s our little miracle and is already a fighter.”