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Just hours after emerging from surgery, Ryan Straschnitzki was making plans to overcome the fact that he will never walk again.

He intends to get back on the ice.

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The 18-year-old Humboldt Broncos defenceman, who broke his back in a team bus crash that killed 15 others, underwent a successful surgery Saturday that lasted close to seven hours, his father, Tom, said. At 11 a.m., the Airdrie family was told Straschnitzki would be paralyzed from the chest down but able to move his arms and head.

“He’s alive and breathing, so we really don’t care about that,” said Tom. “As long as he’s alive.”

But he said his son is already starting to set goals.

“He keeps wanting to try and move his legs, of course, because he wants to go back skating,” said Tom. “He just looked at me and his mother and he goes, ‘well, I’m gonna get onto the Olympic sledge hockey team.’

“He’s an amazing kid, that boy.”

Straschnitzki was taken to hospital on Friday after his team’s bus collided with a semi-trailer near the intersection of Highway 335 and Highway 35 while the on the way to play the Nipawin Hawks.