from Ken Warren of the Ottawa Citizen,

As practical as the decision is, believing an additional six-month break will alleviate all concerns when he returns for training camp next September, it’s also full of emotion. Yet MacArthur’s current mood pales in comparison to the frustration, fog and futility of the previous five months.

For weeks, he needed toothpicks to keep his eyes open. For months, he endured “stinging” headaches. He couldn’t watch TV. He couldn’t read. He couldn’t focus on anything — including his wife, Jessica, three-year-old daughter, Emery, and now 10-month old son, Gus — for more than five minutes at a time.

The initial estimates of being out for only 10 weeks came and went with little improvement. When he did make his first tentative steps at returning in January, it felt like he was “floating around” on the ice.

MacArthur expects no sympathy. He says he created his own nightmare, ignoring telltale concussion symptoms at the end of training camp.

“I feel like if I had just went with my gut instinct from Day 1, I would have missed 10 games and I would have played the rest of the year,” MacArthur said in an exclusive interview with Postmedia at his Ottawa home last week. “It would have been a different situation. It could have been a completely different year.”

Instead, he looks back — in painstaking detail — about his long months of inactivity and uncertainty.

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