PATIENT DIARIES:
How advances in medicine helped this athlete reach his gold medal dream,
Tyler McGregor started playing hockey at age three. At 15, he was starting his minor midget year with the HuronPerth Lakers. It was his OHL draft year and the skilled McGregor looked to be on his way there — and possibly even further.
But in his first tournament of the season, McGregor took a minor check and broke his left leg in two places. Still, after his surgery, he was walking within a month and skating a few weeks later.
“Recovery was going great and I started to practise with the team again, but around that time I noticed a bump below my left knee,” says McGregor, who grew up in Forest, Ont.
“Four months after the break, I went in for a checkup to get the go-ahead to start playing again with full contact. The bump had grown quite large and an X-ray showed a significant amount of the bone in that area was gone. The titanium rod they had put in during surgery was what was supporting my leg.”
McGregor was diagnosed with spindle cell sarcoma, a form of soft tissue cancer. A week after his diagnosis, he was told the cancer had spread to his lower leg and, to save his life, he needed to have his leg amputated.
He was most devastated by the thought that he’d never play hockey again.
“It was far more difficult to comprehend losing my leg and never being able to play hockey again than to hear I had cancer,” says McGregor, now 24. “When I heard I had cancer, I thought I would do chemotherapy and be healthy again and be back on skates. At 15, I had little knowledge of what cancer entails. I was completely devastated at the thought of never playing hockey again.”
McGregor had surgery to remove his left leg above the knee. He spent the next few months learning to walk on a prosthetic leg. His treatment also included eight months of chemotherapy.
Because the drug McGregor received could damage the heart it had to be administered slowly to reduce the chance of toxicity, and he was admitted to hospital for 48 hours for each treatment.
“My heart function was decreasing,” McGregor says. “But fortunately, a drug was developed that could be administered with the treatment to protect the heart. It also meant treatment could be given over a few hours without me being admitted. Because of it, my heart function improved and I was able to continue on the right path with my treatment.”
McGregor says he is grateful that pharmaceutical research and investment in finding innovative therapies not only made his treatment easier, but ultimately helped him regain his health so that he could return to the ice.
All during his treatment, McGregor was itching to play hockey. “It was the first thing on my mind when I was on track to getting healthy again,” he says. A former hockey coach introduced him to sledge hockey.
“I was shocked at how difficult it was physically. It was a new challenge and being a competitive guy and high-performance athlete, I wanted to be the best,” says McGregor.
He made Team Canada in 2012. Since then, the team has earned two golds and a silver at the IPC World Championships, a bronze at the 2014 Paralympic Winter Games in Sochi and a silver this year at the Paralympic Winter Games in PyeongChang, where McGregor was alternate captain. At the 2017 World Para Ice Hockey Championships, McGregor scored two goals in 13 seconds in the gold medal game, as Canada defeated the rival US team 4-1 to win a record fourth world title.
Stories like McGregor’s are the reason pharmaceutical industries continue to invest in research and development to find new treatments, as well as therapies that enhance existing ones to improve patient outcome, says Rhonda O’Gallagher, vice-president, Corporate Affairs, Pfizer Canada.
“Our company has been a partner of the Canadian Paralympic Committee for more than 21 years,” she says. “We take great pride in athletes’ remarkable achievements and in the scientific innovations that may have helped some of these athletes become healthy again following major disease or trauma.”
Playing for Team Canada is something McGregor dreamed about ever since he started playing hockey. But for him, the sport has always been about even more than that.
“The speed and physicality of the game, the fluidity. It’s a difficult game to play and very fast-paced, which is what attracted me to it,” he says. “I love being part of a team. Being inside the locker room with your very best friends. It’s kind of a sacred place. When you get older and still get to play a kids’ game, you feel pretty lucky.”