It was an odd place for something meaningful to happen. Last Sunday, a bunch of us trudged into the hockey arena from a chilly morning outside. In our dressing room, bags of equipment were tossed on the floor, but nobody was in any hurry to put on hockey gear. Then, for some reason, we got talking about prostate exams. And initially it sparked a predictable response around the room.
“Well, if I was in that position, I wouldn’t want a doctor with long, fat fingers doing the examination,” somebody said. There was some laughter.
“Unless, maybe it was a female physician,” another said in jest.
Oldtimers’ hockey dressing rooms – since the concept of recreational hockey for men and women over the age of 40 began back in the mid-1970s – are a phenomenon unto themselves.
At least in my experience (inside oldtimers’ men’s locker rooms) little or nothing of consequence ever gets discussed. It’s kind of like an episode of Seinfeld, the TV show about nothing. The chatter – led by amateur comedians in the group or those with the loudest voices – doesn’t amount to much more than bad jokes, shooting down the latest Toronto Maple Leafs coaching strategies and/or poking fun at each other’s ineptitudes on the ice so far this season.
But last Sunday morning was different. Following the prostate exam jokes, the conversation took a serious turn when my teammate Neil Orr, who’s 59, chose to speak up. “I’ll tell you everything I know about prostate cancer,” he told us. And, as we all made ourselves look busy putting on our hockey gear, the dressing room went quiet, and everybody listened to Neil describe his experience.
He openly recounted how the past 12 months have changed him from someone half-heartedly interested in prostate cancer, to a survivor of prostate cancer, to an advocate among his peers to take it seriously and join the fight to save lives.
After Neil’s pep talk in a room full of men mostly in their 40s and 50s, and after we’d finished our Sunday morning hockey game, we all went our separate ways. But I thought I owed Neil a note of thanks. I emailed him that I appreciated his willingness to talk about his condition so openly. I suggested that, unlike women (I suspect), men rarely talk about these things that way, almost suggesting with their indifference, if not their spoken word, “Hey, I’m stronger than that stuff. It won’t beat me!” Neil referred me to his blog. In it he’d written:
“It was just hours after (my doctor) told me my diagnosis, that I found myself searching for purpose. I didn’t cower and ask, ‘Why me?’ Instead, I said, ‘Why not me?’ Why not give cancer to someone who has the capacity to fight it physically and mentally?”
Remarkably, Neil Orr, who served 28 years with York Regional Police before retiring in 2012, has participated in the moustache-growing fundraisers since the early 2000s, when the whole idea started with a pair of Australians campaigning to fight breast cancer.
But when Neil’s urologist, Dr. DiConstanzo in Stouffville, told Neil he had prostate cancer, the idea of raising awareness suddenly became personal. His prostate cancer screening count was 58 (about 50 points higher than it should be) and like his doctor, Neil committed himself to “throwing everything they had” at his disease.
Here’s why. According the Canadian Cancer Society, this year (2021) 24,000 Canadian men will be diagnosed with prostate cancer, and 4,500 of them will die from it. That’s 12 Canadian men every day. But the good news is that thanks to increased awareness of the disease and the greater number of men taking the prostate specific antigen (PSA) test, death rates have declined steadily since 1994.
“It’s certainly a story that NEEDS to be told in a room full of men,” Neil Orr wrote me back in his email on Sunday. “Speaking about it has kind of become the purpose of this journey for me.”
By coincidence, today (Thursday), as my column is published, I am in consultation with my family doctor about a number of medical things – some that have been put off because of the pandemic, but others sparked by what happened last Sunday morning.
And thanks to my teammate Neil Orr, I’ll be raising some of the points he made clearly and calmly in that oldtimers’ hockey dressing room where rarely anything of consequence is discussed.
And you know what? I couldn’t care less whether the examining physician has long, fat fingers or not, or whether the examiner is male or female. As Neil Orr helped a bunch of us understand – just as this month’s Movember campaign comes to an end – prostate cancer is no laughing matter.