Overtime Hero

“I bet I can guess how old you are in three tries,” I said to the girl who sat in a chair colouring.

She was wearing one of those shirts with the kind of sequence beads that can be brushed one way to make one design and another to reveal a different design.  I knew these shirts were all the rage for the last few years.  I had a lot of experience with them in my own house.

“Okay,” she replied.

I guessed, “I think you are fifty-two.  Are you fifty-two?”

She gave me a giggle.

I continued, “Oh.  You’re not fifty-two.  Hmmm.  Are you thirteen?”

“Nope,” she continued to smile.

My last try was, “Are you eight?”

“Yes,” she beamed.

“Eight. That’s a great age to be,” I told her.

Beside this eight-year-old girl sat her mother.  Her brother was across the small room sitting in a chair of his own.  I already knew her brother was thirteen.

Her brother was holding a hand.  This hand belonged to a very yellow looking man who laid in a traditional hospital bed.  He looked tired.  He had intravenous fluid running into an arm vein.  I can’t remember if he already had oxygen blowing toward his nose through nasal prongs situated on his upper lip at that point.  If it wasn’t blowing then, it surely was to be blowing shortly thereafter.  This man, this dad, was dying of colorectal cancer.  His name was Brad.

I met Brad a few days earlier when he was transferred to our cancer hospital from a general hospital where he had been admitted after presenting to the emergency room feeling unwell.  He was just feeling unwell.  That’s why he went to the emergency room.

For a few months prior, he hadn’t been feeling like himself.  He was more tired.  He lacked energy.  He had gained some weight that he thought was just unwanted Christmas/winter weight that had gotten trapped around his belly area.  But then he and his family started to notice swelling in his feet and legs, a slight change to his skin colour, and the whites of his eyes had turned yellow.

After only a couple of investigations, he was told he had metastatic colorectal cancer.  His cancer started in his colon and dramatically spread to his liver.  His blood work reflected a very sick liver.  In fact, his blood work showed Brad was literally dying, and dying fast.

From that hospital, he was referred to medical oncology at my cancer centre.  I happened to be on triage for our gastrointestinal oncology group that week.  I had to decide if we would see this patient, how that would happen, and if there was anything we might be able to offer to him even though it was expected that his cancer was too far advanced for any treatment to have an impact on how long he would live.  I decided I had to assess Brad face-to-face to make that decision.

Around that time, I started hearing about Brad through the grapevine of our local hockey community.  I have the privilege of being a hockey mom.  I know a lot of hockey families.  I’ve had ten plus years of early mornings to the rink, which have now turned to late night games, countless Tim Horton’s drive through visits to grab Timbits for the team and “roll-up the rims” for me, and innumerable hours freezing my finger, toes, and butt off in cold arenas for practices, games, and tournaments.  Over the years, acquaintances at the rink are made.  Some acquaintances turn into friends.  Friendships with other hockey parents develop that will last well beyond the buzzer indicating the end of the third period of the last game my son will ever play.

Brad’s family is a hockey family too so of course they also know a lot of hockey families.  Though I had never met Brad, his wife, or his hockey-playing son, I recognized their last name.  It turned out that Brad, his wife, and I knew a lot of the same hockey families.

Brad was transferred to the cancer centre under my care.  When I asked for him to be transfered, I made sure our admitting team knew his wife was to be let into the building so that Brad, she, and I could have a frank discussion about the heartbreaking situation that was their reality.  At our hospital, we had the luxury of allowing immediate family members into the building if the treating physician deemed a patient to be within a few days to weeks of death.  This was reason enough to get him over to our hospital because from the time he went to the emergency room, was diagnosed, and told he was dying, Brad hadn’t seen his wife or kids.  The Covid pandemic was limiting visitors into hospitals.  Brad was having to get all the devastating news about his diagnosis and prognosis alone and relay this information to his wife by phone.  Our cancer team had to be able to fix that for him and his family.

I know the first meeting I had with Brad and his wife was traumatic for them.  I could see it.  I could feel it.  It was the first time they were together hearing the facts about Brad’s cancer and how it would kill him.

I wonder if memories from this meeting haunt his wife.  I hope not.  If they do and if I could, I would take the burden of those memories from her.  There was no way around that meeting though.  I had to tell them both a lot of things:

Brad was going to die.  Death would come soon.  Soon meant a few days, maybe a week, maybe two.  I didn’t know if chemotherapy would make much of a difference but it was the only chance that might allow him a little more time with his family.  Chemo would be hard on him.  His blood work looked terrible.  His liver was packing it in.  If he wanted to try the chemo, I would figure out a dose that would be as safe as possible under the circumstances.  Chemo would still be risky even if I modified the doses.  We could just keep him comfortable.  He didn’t have to try chemo.  It was up to him.  What do you want to do Brad?

I made sure to impress upon Brad and his wife that above all else, if they thought it was right for their family, that they should spend whatever the next days would look like together.  I tried to be as clear as possible that there was little time and that I hoped they could find solace and safety and cocoon themselves from the rest of the world in that tiny hospital room – to just be.  To just be together, as a family.  To be physically close.  To say all of the things they needed to say to each other.  To hear each other.  To touch each other.  To feel each other.  To just be present in the few moments that were left for the four of them.

Brad did not hesitate when he decided he would try chemotherapy.  He wanted to try.  He needed to try.  So he tried.  With sincerity, it was one of the gutsiest tries I’ve ever had the privilege of watching.

I saw such humanity every time I walked into Brad’s room.  A father and son holding hands or lying beside each other on the hospital bed. A mom and a daughter cuddling on the pull out bed.  A husband and wife sharing sad and knowing eye contact laced with doubt and dread and sorrow and grief.  My goodness, it was so hard to watch and yet such an honour to see.  And each time I left that room I thought to myself, “I cannot even imagine how difficult this is for them”.

Each time I walked out of that room I also thought about how much better the world might be if we could all treat the people we love with the tenderness that was occurring in that room when death was not on the table. Why don’t we always live like we are dying with the people we love the most?  How wonderful the world would be if families were always so present with each other, so caring, so connected.  It is ironic that what we search for in life often only comes in death.  What a blessing that part of Brad’s death will be for his family.  I hope his wife and son and daughter carry the beautiful love they all shared in that room with them for the rest of their lives.  I hope they carry it gently, with passion, and with self-compassion.  They deserve to carry that love more than their grief.

Brad went to the hospital and didn’t get out.  He died twenty days after he showed up in the emergency room.  Twenty days is not a lot of time.  It’s not a lot of time to hear, understand, adjust, and accept a death sentence.  It’s not a lot of time to prepare for death’s inevitability as a spouse.  It’s certainly not a lot of time to try to explain death and dying to an eight and thirteen year old who, just a few weeks earlier, would never in a million years have thought their dad would be physically gone from their lives in a few short sleeps.

I like to imagine Brad’s last breathes were coupled with him hearing the loud roar of the home town crowd after he scored the overtime goal in the seventh game of the Stanley Cup finals.  Every single fan in the house jumping out of their seats, hands reaching for the rafters where their team’s new championship banner will soon hang.  Teammates on the ice rushing to catch up with him after he crashed into the side boards in excitement when he realized the puck snuck through on the short side, the rest of the team trying to jump the boards from the bench to reach the celebratory huddle.

Even though he knew he wasn’t going to win, Brad armored up in his equipment, laced up his skates, grabbed an old wooden heavy and cumbersome hockey stick, and he tried.  Brad was a grinder.  He went into the corners to play tough and dig out the puck from the scrum.  He stood in front of the net to get cross checked and slashed in attempts to screen the goalie so the slap shot from the point could get to the back of the net.  He picked a fight with the other team’s goon to get his bench and the crowd back into the game.  From my seat in the stands, Brad got the Stanley Cup winning goal because even when he got punched in the face and lost a row of chiclets that were now spewed across the ice, he mustered up enough courage to try.  In every single way, Brad was a clutch, Stanley cup finals, seventh game, sudden death, overtime-scoring hero.

Brad’s is the hockey story we should be telling our kids.  Try – with everything you’ve got.   Even if you don’t have a lot.  Even if the odds are stacked against you and there is no way on earth, or in hell, that you have a chance to win.  Try.  Life is about more than winning. Life is about showing up, suiting up, and doing everything you can do with everything in you in those moments that matter.  We can’t win them all.  But we can have integrity.  Win or lose with integrity and it will always gain you two points in the standings of life.

I hope, with everything in me, that as Brad’s kids grow up they know, with everything in them, that their dad tried his very best.  I hope his kids and his wife know that Brad got a Stanley Cup parade with a shit ton of pomp and circumstance, and the gaudiest of gaudy Stanley cup rings, wherever he ended up after his last breath.  Brad’s story is the OT hero story that helps us win at life.

Author Notes:

I am coming to the understanding that the impact any individual patient has on me has little to do with the length of time I am involved in their care and everything to do with the feelings that are stirred within me while I share part of their journey and the lessons that they seem to be trying to teach me.  Case in point:  Brad.

I can tell you that I cried every single night as I drove home to my two kids knowing Brad was dying in our hospital with his family by his side.  Still now, writing and re-reading this story brings me to tears.

When Brad died, my son was fourteen and my daughter eleven.  When I got home after those drives, I wiped my tears, breathed deeply a few times, and made sure I went straight inside for some hugs.  I squeezed my kids a little tighter.  I held on to them a little longer.  When the three of us sat down for supper around our dining room table, I made it more of a purposeful act to watch my kids’ faces and expressions and listen a little harder to the happenings of their days as they recounted them to me.

Brad’s death gave me renewed determination to try to be present, fully present, in the moments of time.  Teaching me to be present in each moment is a great gift that many of my patients have tried to give me.  Yet still, I’m a slow learner when it comes to embracing this teaching.  Brad’s early death was a slap shot to the head kind of wake-up call – the kind that rang my bell loudly enough to make me realize time is flying by and I don’t know how much more there will be.

I want each delicious moment to last.  And so, I continue to try.

What do you want to try for?  What is one thing that you want to try to be better at?  I am curious to know.