Esks president undergoes prostate cancer treatment
Rhodes, 53, diagnosed during routine medical, says disease caught in Stage 1
From his third-storey office overlooking the gridiron at Commonwealth Stadium, Len Rhodes has become familiar with a football backdrop to his life.
As president and CEO of the Edmonton Eskimos since 2011, he oversees the ins and outs of running an organization whose success depends on its coaches, players and staff abiding by the rules of the CFL.
But lately, the 53-year-old native of Montreal has been forced to explore territory that has, up until this point, been very much foreign to him.
And the situation he’s now facing doesn’t play by any rules.
During a routine medical last summer, a blood test flagged higher than average prostate specific antigen, which led to him getting a biopsy around the same time the Eskimos were preparing for the East Division final against the Hamilton Tiger-Cats in November.
“I got my results coming back from Grey Cup in Toronto, just a few days later and, unfortunately, got hit with the news that I was diagnosed with prostate cancer,” said Rhodes. “Cancer, someone told me recently, doesn’t play by the rules. The old wrestling adage is ‘no holds barred.’ It does what it wants to do, it’s unpredictable and doesn’t play by the rules.
“In football, we could pull out a coach’s challenge.”
But this isn’t football. “This is uncharted territory, I know a lot of people have unfortunately had to deal with this but when you go through something for the first time, you really don’t know what to expect,” said Rhodes, who faced the reality of his situation head on by immediately beginning homework on cancer treatments as well as his family background. “I actually joked the day of finding out I was diagnosed with cancer, I joked with the doctors, saying: ‘My family dies from heart attacks, this is uncharted territory for us.’
“So cancer was never really something that had hit close to home in my lifetime until it happened to me.”
Rhodes has been recovering since undergoing prostate brachytherapy at the Cross Cancer Institute on March 7. During the surgical procedure, 76 small radioactive seeds were placed inside the prostate gland. While the seeds will remain there for life, they will no longer emit radioactivity after approximately a year and eight months.
“I was treated like gold by the staff and the doctors. True, human attention,” Rhodes said. “I went in for day surgery and was released the same day.”
While he was only scheduled to miss a couple weeks of work around the procedure, part of him feels like he’d never even left the office.
“When I woke up from general anesthesia, I was dreaming about being at an Eskimos home game and I was mingling with fans, so I can’t stop thinking about work even when I’m on the operating table,” Rhodes said, before chuckling. “I don’t know if that’s a good sign or a bad sign, but it is. That’s exactly what I was dreaming about.”
Unable to travel or lift more than 10 pounds during the recovery process, Rhodes is missing out on the inaugural CFL Week festivities in Regina this week. At the same time, Canadian Football Hall-of-Famer and Eskimos legend Larry Highbaugh, who died while undergoing heart surgery Tuesday evening, had also been diagnosed with prostate cancer.
Rhodes knows he is hardly alone when it comes to facing cancer.
And he doesn’t want sympathy. What he wants is to use his story to, hopefully, encourage anyone and everyone to stop coming up with excuses to avoid their annual checkup.
“I feel very fortunate that if I’m going to have cancer that it ends up being prostate cancer because a lot of people who have been diagnosed with prostate cancer have a very good probability for recovery and for cure,” Rhodes said.
As long as it’s caught early enough, of course.
“The good news out of that is I was diagnosed at Stage 1, which meant it was treatable and I also had choices in terms of treatment options, including removing my prostate,” said Rhodes. “Because it was diagnosed early, I have a good prognosis for treatment, recovery and cure.”
What he was less sure about, and understandably so, was going public with such a personal matter. While he alerted some media, along with Eskimos staff members and the board of directors, early on in the process in efforts to provide full disclosure while also maintaining his privacy, Rhodes wound up cancelling an initial interview for this story, and struggled with the same decision a second time around. In the end, he realized the benefits outweighed any drawbacks if it meant bringing attention to prostate cancer.
“Honestly, what took me so long to get back to you is I didn’t really want this to be about me,” Rhodes said. “You go through something like this, it’s very personal. But at the same time, any time in my life when I come across a negative, I try to find a positive.
“The stats show now in Canada one in eight men will be diagnosed with prostate cancer. Go for a full physical every year. Don’t procrastinate, don’t avoid it, do something about it.”