{coyotes} Former NHL Players and Families Meet with Congress About Concussions: 'This Can't Be Tucked Under the Rug Anymore'

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Former National Hockey League players and their families recently went to the White House to speak with Obama administration officials and members of Congress about the extreme toll concussions has played on their lives.

"I describe it as watching someone in a fire, in a house, and I couldn't pull him out," Temple Greenleaf, the wife of former defenseman Dale Purinton, told The Huffington Post. "There was nothing I could do. There was no help I could give him."

Purinton, who suffered multiple concussions during his career that he says led him to "self-medicate" with alcohol and pain medication, sat down with fellow former players and several members of Congress over two days last week to draw attention to the issue.

After leaving hockey in 2008, Purinton and other players sued the league, saying they mishandled concussion treatments and concealed the long-term effects of brain injuries.

According to the news outlet, the suit is similar to the one more than 4,500 former football players settled with the NFL.

"This can't be tucked under the rug anymore," Purinton said. "We were all young children aspiring to be NHL hockey players. And we finally get to that point, and it's led us into so many situations of depression, anxiety, addictions. And the root cause is concussions. We're here to tell our story, to make a difference for current players, future players, and past players – and players who are no longer with us."

Another former NHL player, Dan LaCouture, spoke out about losing control after suffering a concussion when he fell to the ice during a fight in 2004. According to LaCouture, the team doctor didn't send him to the hospital for an MRI.

He first turned to alcohol – two bottles of wine a night – to deal with depression, and then Ambien.

His marriage fell apart, he was arrested twice and can't see his two kids regularly anymore.

"I'm angry at how I was taken care of," he told the news outlet. Earlier this year, the NFL admitted that there is a link between concussions and chronic traumatic encephalopathy, but the NHL continues to deny any connection.

"The relationship between concussions and the asserted clinical symptoms of C.T.E. remains unknown," NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman told The New York Times in July.

Yet CTE has been diagnosed in at least six deceased NHL players, along with roughly 100 former N.F.L. players. Scientists believe it is caused by repeated blows to the head, the newspaper reports.

Adds LaCouture: "Dale and I aren't here because there's some pot of gold at the end of the rainbow," he told the Huffington Post. "There's no friggin' money. It's medical monitoring. None of us ... want to live and feel this way."

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