Copyright Hartford Courant
Bella Zolezzi, a senior at Loomis Chaffee, has played ice hockey since she was 4 years old. When she went down in a game or a practice, she always bounced back up. But this time, at a game on Sept. 21, she did not. That Sunday, Kim Zolezzi was home in Oswego, Ill., watching her daughter’s club team, the Mid-Fairfield Stars, play at the New England Sports Center in Marlborough, Mass. on a livestream. Bella got hit, went head-first into the boards and lay still on the ice. Kim panicked. She started throwing clothes into a suitcase. Bella knew something was wrong; she couldn’t move her legs. There was a nurse by her head, telling her everything would be OK. She knew her mom would be watching the livestream and would be worried. She had the presence of mind to ask the nurse to call Kim. “She’s like, ‘Hey, Mom, I’m just letting you know I’m fine,’” Kim said last week. “I’m like, ‘Bella…’ I was in panic mode. ‘I’m coming.’ She’s like, ‘No, no need to worry.’” Said Bella: “I was like, ‘Mom, I’m OK, please don’t stress.’ I wanted to make sure everyone knew I was OK. I felt like everything would work out.” At the hospital, they found that Bella had broken the C6 vertebrae in her neck in three places, compressed the vertebrae and damaged her spinal cord. But after surgery and subsequent rehabilitation, Bella is back at Loomis Chaffee, going to class, going to Senior Night for her field hockey team – and walking. “Everybody says it’s a miracle, just because of how bad the injury was – fracturing my C6 and also being compressed with damage to the spinal cord,” Bella said. “They say it’s honestly a miracle that I’m walking, which I’m really grateful for.” Bella, who still wears a cervical collar to protect her neck, will not be able to play hockey for 4-6 months. That may keep her from playing her senior year at Loomis, which won a New England prep championship last season, but she said she doesn’t want to rush back and wants to be fully recovered to be able to play at Assumption College next year. “Her resilience and work ethic and determination to get healthy and to heal is something I’ve never seen from anybody before,” Loomis Chaffee girls ice hockey coach Liz Leyden said. “Her positive attitude helps her in her recovery process. There’s a constant belief she’s going to get better, she’s going to work at it.” Though her flight was delayed that awful day in September, Kim made it from Illinois to the hospital in Massachusetts where her daughter had been taken. There, she found a crowd of people supporting her daughter. “I feel like I had all these angels watching over her,” Kim said. “I had the team of moms from Mid-Fairfield. The team of moms from Loomis. They were with her. I had all this support. Everybody knew we were from out of state – I didn’t know where to go, or what doctors to use – they made meals, they were bringing Bella clothes,” she said. “When I got to the ER, there were her whole team, Mid-Fairfield and Loomis and her coaches and the moms – I just felt relieved she wasn’t there by herself.” Bella came to Loomis as a sophomore and played field hockey and ice hockey. Last year, she scored two goals in the championship game against Phillips Academy Andover and the Pelicans won their first New England Prep School Athletic Council, or NEPSAC, Elite Eight title since 1989. She had just started the season with Mid-Fairfield, her club team, when the injury happened. “It was honestly just a fluke accident,” Bella said. “I was coming down the boards. The girl hit me from the side. I kind of twisted in a way, I was far enough from the boards that my head overextended. “I remember the game until the point of the hit. I remember being on the ice. I had a nurse holding my head. It was honestly like an angel above looking down. She was walking by and saw the hit, sprinted down. The coach on the other team was an EMT, he was also very helpful. All my coaches were by me, talking to me.” Bella said she wanted to reassure her mother and her scared teammates that it would be OK. “I was like, ‘OK, just breath,’” she said. “ ‘God has a plan for me. Whatever He has in mind, I just have to go with it.’ I was using that as a way to calm myself down.” She was in the intensive care unit for 2 ½ weeks, mainly because there was an issue with her blood pressure and heart rate and she fell once and needed three stitches. “She’s been so positive and strong,” her mother said. “I don’t know where she gets it from. I just sit there in awe. When something’s not going her way, for example, like when she fell and had to get those stitches, she was like, ‘It could have been worse, it was only three stitches.’” Bella was released and began rehabilitation in Boston. On the advice of her physical therapist, she ditched her walker on the second day because, the therapist said, it was getting in her way. “It pushed me to fully relearn how to walk,” Bella said. She was there for two weeks before returning to Loomis. She still has a fiery sensation in her arms from nerve damage. She can’t feel temperature fluctuations below her waist. “It’s good because I know everything is rebuilding, that’s how I look at it,” she said. “I kind of like it because it means I’m recovering.” Her mother stayed with her until this past week, when she returned home. Bella will have another checkup in a few weeks to make sure everything is healing properly. “Teachers at Loomis have been incredibly supportive in communicating with Bella but also recognizing she’s still healing as she’s getting back into school,” Leyden said. “But I don’t know that any of us thought that she’d be back at school at this point in time. You never know with this type of injury. “She’s walking around, back in classes – so many factors had to go right. The fact she’s walking means that all of the steps after her injury happened that needed to happen.”
