Mom’s toughness inspired Redblacks QB to battle
Harris says witnessing a fight with cancer ‘puts things in perspective’
You want to talk about O T TAWA tough? Nine days after having surgery for a torn meniscus in his knee, Ottawa Redblacks quarterback Trevor Harris played in a college football game.
Tougher? How about Suzanne, the mother in the Harris family, who tackled Stage 3 breast cancer with a happy-go-lucky attitude?
Friday night against the Hamilton Tiger-Cats is the Redblacks’ annual Pink Game, which raises funds to help fight women’s cancers. Harris, along with some of his teammates and coaches, will wear pink, and lots of it.
“Last year, they made a big story out of how tough I was for taking hits and keeping playing,” Harris said. “I was like, ‘Man, toughness is fighting cancer and winning and doing it with a smile on your face … that’s my mother.’
“It puts things in perspective in terms of what toughness really is. Coming out (on the football field), it’s just a little pain and some nicks. Sure, we get injured, but it’s not like injecting poisonous chemotherapy into your body and killing blood cells — in the process making you sick to then make you feel better.”
Harris was 22 in 2009 when he got a text to call his mom. In tears, Suzanne told him she had breast cancer. A family that was so tight spiritually had a huge hurdle to overcome.
“It was one of those moments in life where you push the pause button and think about how grateful and how lucky you are to have your loved ones,” Harris said. “When my mom said she had Stage 3 breast cancer — it wasn’t Stage 1 or precancer, it was well into the stages. It was breast cancer with an unknown primary source.”
It wasn’t just that Suzanne took the diagnosis in stride, it was the way she continued to selflessly live — her infectious zest for life amazing those around her. Through all her chemotherapy and radiation treatments, through surgery to remove her lymph nodes, through the vomiting and all the other after-affects, she went to her kid’s football games, all of them in Trevor’s senior season at Edinboro University in Pennsylvania. In his final game, Harris threw for an NCAA Division II single-game record of 630 yards. His mom was there.
“You can call me a mama’s boy, but I call my mom every morning to make sure she knows I love her, that I appreciate her,” Harris said. “When you have a scare, when you have a mother as good my mother is, it’s just one of those things that puts things in perspective in terms of what’s important.”