Even knowing it would serve his best interests long-term didn't make the decision any easier.
Miles Wood is a glue guy, he is a heartbeat of a team, of a game. He is your all-encompassing team-first guy, making the decision to remove himself from the majority of a season all that more difficult.
"(If it was) a golf thing, it wouldn't be a big problem because you know, all the pressures on you or whatever. But when you play in such a team atmosphere, day in and day out, and the fact that you're hurting 23 guys, I think that was the hardest part that I finally had to swallow."
Wood leaned on former teammates like Cory Schneider and John Moore, as well as Tyler Seguin who have all had a similar, if not identical procedure done. The 26-year-old is an introspective person and like acquiring information. Speaking to them put him at ease with his decision, recalling the Lightning's Nikita Kucherov's surgery and he came back and had a crazy playoff.
"It's been a long process for sure," he said taking a deep sigh.
Wood considered himself lucky that he didn't experience any setbacks, his road to recovery has been fairly smooth and linear, but what it has been is long. The days when the rest of the team was on the road were some of the harder days, where Wood described the room as 'very quiet' and a 'whole different atmosphere'. In its own way, that quiet served its own purpose, a motivation to get back as fast as he could, "because to skate with only two guys on the ice, doing gym work, day in and day out, it gets old quickly."
Relief.
That is the word that Wood uses when he's asked what it will be like to hear from the doctors that he's cleared to practice with his teammates. It's the only word he can utter before the emotion of the thought becomes too big. It becomes clear the magnitude of emotion that is flowing through the discussion.
Hw takes a brief pause.
For Wood to miss nearly one year, it is more than being away from his teammates, the game he loves, and the thrill of competition. It suddenly stripped away the biggest piece of his identity. It was another experience he had to come to terms with.
"When you play day-in and day-out, you don't really think of the fact that you know," he said, "if I don't play for a year it's not a big deal, but it is a huge deal. And I think the thing for me that I learned the most throughout this process is your best days are playing hockey and your worst days are playing hockey."
Wood said this entire experience put him in a position where he had to face a new reality, but it is one that also offered him a new perspective.
"When I finally came to that choice of doing the surgical route," he said, "when hockey is stripped away from you in a moment, that's when it's like, it puts it in perspective real quick, of what the game actually means to you. And it was a very eye-opening thing for me."
His journey back to health is not fully complete yet, but as he rejoins his teammates at practice, even in a no-contact jersey, the finish line finally looks more in sight. Part of his identity is slowly being pieced back together.
"Once I start to get back into the team practices at that point, I think the Miles Wood is back."
It feels safe to say that when that next step beyond practice arrives and he straps on the skates and puts on his No. 44 Devils jersey for the first time this season, he'll have a new perspective on what this game means to him.
"Just not take it for granted. I just can't wait to get back," Wood said. "It's been a long, very long process, something that I didn't think could happen, but clearly, it did, the cards were dealt. But I can't wait to get back and playing with the guys."
And neither can they.
