Former Canuck staffer could have taken payout, 'but hockey culture is toxic'
Rachel Doerrie says going to the B.C. Human Rights Tribunal is not about the money, but about public accountability. 'If I don't speak out, then I'm upholding the toxic culture. And I won't do that'
Sometime in the late afternoon of Sept. 21, Rachel Doerrie said she woke up in the bathroom of her room in the Fairmont Hotel in Whistler, B.C. She had no idea how long she had been there. In the previous hours, her heart beat had consistently been somewhere in the range of 160 beats per minute, going as high as 200. And she was pretty certain she had hit her head when she passed out, “because I had a really big headache.”
The 25-year-old analyst and assistant to the video coach of the Vancouver Canucks had experienced a cardiac episode brought on by anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), something that can be a common occurrence for those with a heart condition known as vasovagal syncope. Doerrie said a cardiac specialist once told her that when the anxiety reached its height, she would have eight seconds to lie down to mitigate the episode or she would faint.
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