He amazes me.

            I sit here in the locker room, watching the way he smiles as he grants interviews. It's a familiar sight-one that I've seen nearly every day since I got her. Pittsburgh's media has learned that Andy will never let anyone down. He is always straightforward, always honest, always eloquent in his answers. He knows that he's lucky to be in his position, and he shows his appreciation every chance that he can. He loves the city, the team, the fans.
            Which is why he's going to spend the afternoon in the hospital having all sorts of tests run on him. Doctors will be prodding and poking and trying to figure out what's wrong, why he hurts so much. He’ll never how badly the pain bothers him, so no one can really understand. None of the men interviewing him can even begin to comprehend it. The media hasn’t watched him hobble into the showers after a game, hunched over, clutching his stomach. Pittsburgh Sports Tonight doesn’t have the audio of him crying in his sleep because the painkillers have worn off. The fans haven’t found him curled up in a hotel bathroom because it hurt too badly to finish taking a shower. They haven’t seen what I have. So they can’t understand how incredible he is.

            After playing through an entire season of pain, trying to ignore it, hoping it would just go away, now he’s paying the price. He had a spectacular camp until the injury flared up again on Saturday—right before he was supposed to play against his favorite opponent, Jaromir Jagr. He’ll never tell me or anyone else, but it was killing him to sit in the press box and watch that game.

            So here he is. After a promising preseason, he’s almost guaranteed to start the season on injured reserve. He’s scared. He’s afraid of what the doctors are going to say tonight, or whenever the results of the tests come through. Nothing has been able to properly diagnose the problem, so he’s praying that this CAT scan will be strong enough to do it. Hopefully, come Monday, we’ll know what is going to happen—good, bad…or really bad.

            Surgery could be the only answer. And then several months of recuperation. He’ll spend a lot of time laying around, watching games, wishing that he could be out there on the ice with us, doing his part to help his team. And it is going to utterly eat him up inside. He will be completely brokenhearted.

            But no one else will ever know.