BY JERRY LINDQUIST
TIMES-DISPATCH STAFF WRITER
Dec 12, 2003
Richmond, Virginia
Anthony DiPalma knows pain.
It isn't just the kind that goes with the territory for a professional hockey player, either. The Richmond RiverDogs defenseman lives with pain on and off the ice, in and out of uniform.
Seven years ago, in his second season of junior hockey, DiPalma was diagnosed with Crohn's disease. By definition, it is a chronic inflammatory bowel disease of unknown origin and characterized by severe abdominal pain, nausea, fever, chills, weakness and weight loss. Crohn's is controllable, but there is no known cure. An estimated 500,000 Americans have Crohn's.
"The whole season I was sick. Just constantly tired," DiPalma said. "They started testing, and the first thing they told me was, 'Stop playing hockey.'
"They said, 'Your body won't be able to take it because of the medicine. Your muscles will deteriorate, your joints will rot away.'"
Sounds like a pretty serious warning, doesn't it? But DiPalma was 19 going on 20. He heard, but he didn't listen.
"Who are they to tell me I can't play?" DiPalma said. "I know they knew best, but it's not going to kill me, playing. People tell you you can't do something, you just go harder."
So here he is, after four years of college, in his third professional campaign, still beating the odds and feeling pretty good about it. Well, as good as anyone can feel who must take some high-powered medicine and wonders how long he can keep it up.
Crohn's affects people with varying degrees of severity. To complicate things, the disease seems to be in remission only to pop up again. Sometimes a number of years go by without further difficulty before Crohn's reappears for no apparent reason and lasts indefinitely.
"Nobody knows why," said a spokesman for the Crohn's and Colitis Foundation of America. "That's the hard thing about living with the disease: the constant uncertainty."
At first, the doctors treated DiPalma with a series of pills that didn't work. Instead of getting better, he got worse.
"I got pretty sick and lost 30 pounds in a week," he said. "That was the worst point, where you didn't know if you were going to die. I was taking up to 50 pills a day because they didn't want to put me on Prednisone. That was tough."
Finally, his physicians felt they had no choice. Prednisone is a steroid that acts as an anti-inflammatory "and takes the pain out of my stomach. Otherwise, I'd be keeled over all the time. But [unlike anabolic steroids], it doesn't make muscle. It actually eats your muscle away and eats away your joints. Longtime use is not good. And I've been stuck on it for seven years. Within two years of taking it, I should have had a hip replacement."
Apparently DiPalma is a living testimonial to the miracles - and vagaries - of modern medicine. He's 6-3 and 235 pounds, with little body fat and both hips still in proper working order.
"Seven years? Everybody responds differently," the spokesman said, "but I'm amazed he's still well enough to play hockey."
As best DiPalma can tell, his workout regimen, which includes vigorous daily exercise in and out of season, has helped him beat the odds. Proper diet helps, too.
"In the long run, the doctors said it was better that I kept playing," he said.
Not that he doesn't have his moments. Earlier this season DiPalma missed a road trip to undergo more tests after Crohn's flared up again.
"You get cramps like someone is stepping on your stomach and driving their foot through you," the native of Wallingford, Conn., said.
Eventually, he will have to stop Prednisone but finding a suitable replacement hasn't been easy.
"You can tell he's in pain, but you never hear him complain about it," said RiverDogs teammate Luch Nasato, who played with DiPalma the past two seasons for CHL Memphis. "He makes jokes about it sometimes and makes it easier for the guys to help them deal with it."
DiPalma refuses to feel sorry for himself. It wouldn't do any good.
"There are a lot of people out there with a lot of worse problems than me. I'm still, in a sense, living a dream playing a sport for a living," he said. "So what am I going to do, sit down, sulk about it and get depressed? No, I'm going out there, have fun and do what I have to do to get by."