As a former hockey player, Paul Henderson has never been known to back down from a challenge. And five years ago, he received a diagnosis that had him literally facing the fight of his life.
He had chronic lymphocytic leukemia, or CLL.
“It was an absolute shock,” he recalls. “I was feeling well. I was in good shape. I had night sweats, but I didn’t know [at the time] that was an indication that you might have cancer.”
Henderson, best known for scoring the winning goal in the 1972 Summit Series against the Soviet Union, as well as for his distinguished NHL career, immediately dove into the task of exploring his options. At the time, they were limited.
“They told me that there was no cure for this at this point, but I would have some time,” he says. “Really, treatment didn’t help longevity. So we put our heads together and got very aggressive, tried to find out as much as we could about this cancer. I tried to beat it from the inside out to start with – took all kinds of vitamins, supplements, worked out.”
But while these efforts may have collectively slowed the progression, they couldn’t stop it. Two and a half years after his diagnosis, he no longer felt well. He had, as both he and his doctors put it, a tumour the size of a grapefruit. 83 per cent of his bone marrow was malignant. He was going to need a more serious course of treatment – but he didn’t like his options.
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No cure
“For the majority of patients, there is no cure [for CLL], unless someone undergoes an allogeneic bone marrow transplant,” says Dr. Ronan Foley, Henderson’s physician and a Hematologist at Juravinski Hospital in Hamilton.
“[A bone marrow transplant] can cure them, but there are a tremendous number of side effects. So the people who go forward with it are really a select few. And they have to find a match first, which sometimes can be a family member but sometimes they have to search the Canadian registry and other worldwide registries.”
For most CLL patients, chemotherapy has traditionally been the only treatment option – and, as Dr. Foley acknowledges, a problematic one at that.
“Chemotherapy basically is designed to kill any dividing cells, and because the leukemia cells are dividing, giving chemotherapy will kill them off to some degree,” he says. “Where you walk the line is, how much chemotherapy can you use to kill the tumour cells knowing that the chemotherapy is also going to be having effects on normal, healthy cells in the patient? And as you get older, the balance shifts and you start to run higher risks of cumulative toxicity in older people.”
Henderson was, however, dead set against chemotherapy. He simply didn’t think his body could handle it. And he worried that while it might buy him an additional few years, his quality of life would suffer as a result of the treatment.
“There’s a lot of people with CLL who’ve gone the chemotherapy route and have gotten a bunch of good years,” he says. “But it’s going to come back on you. You’re probably at three to five years with pretty good health. And then it’ll come back and [they say], ‘We’ll have to hit you twice as hard.’ And then you may have another year. If you’re lucky, maybe a year and a half. I mean, that doesn’t sound very promising to me!”
Order of Canada member Paul Henderson (right) speaks with former teammate and Officer of the Order of Canada Ken Dryden following an induction ceremony at Rideau Hall in Ottawa Friday May 3, 2013. (Photo: The Canadian Press/Adrian Wyld)
A new, targeted treatment
Luckily for Henderson, an option presented itself that turned out to be considerably more promising than chemotherapy: a clinical trial at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, for a new drug called Ibrutinib.
“Thank goodness I was in bad shape,” says Henderson, “because they wanted people who were in bad shape to start taking this. There was going to be no placebo, everybody would get it. And I was really fortunate I qualified.”
A little over two years later, the results have been astounding. His tumours are gone, and he’s down to 5-10 per cent malignancy in his bone marrow. His spleen, which had grown to three times its normal size, has shrunk back down to normal.
But perhaps what’s most remarkable is how the drug itself works. Unlike chemotherapy, which essentially works on the entire body until hopefully the cancer has been beaten back, Ibrutinib only targets the cancer cells.
“In the past, it was kind of like using an atom bomb – you’d just carpet-bomb all the tumours that you could,” says Dr. Foley. “But now it’s kind of like a pocket watch. We can open it up, and we can actually go to the precise mechanism that’s broken in the cancer cell and just target that. No other cells in the body are going to be affected.”
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A new era of cancer therapy
While Ibrutinib, which has recently been approved by Health Canada and now awaits provincial regulation in terms of pricing and availability, has shown some remarkable results among CLL patients, it’s still not a cure. While Henderson’s quality of life has remained excellent throughout the course of his treatment, the fact remains that he is still living with cancer.
“In the clinic, you see these newer drugs where people are talking about their latest vacation or their [golf game] or whatever. Paul’s a great example of that,” says Dr. Foley.
“Of course, this is step one. The next step is: Can we put together treatments that are curing people?”
As no long-term data exists on this drug, there’s a good chance Henderson will continue his course of treatment for the rest of his life. How long, or to what extent, the drug will keep his cancer in check remains uncertain.
But Dr. Foley is optimistic. “This is one of several new drugs that make us say, ‘Welcome to the new era of cancer therapy.’ If you can put them together somehow in a rational manner, maybe you’d have a cure.”
A message for Canadians
Henderson, for his part, has striven to stay positive throughout the course of his illness. It’s a fight, for sure, rife with uncertainty about what sort of turn the disease might take next. But it’s allowed him to put his focus on what matters most in his life.
“Even with cancer, I wouldn’t trade places with anyone in the world,” he says. “That’s how fortunate I feel about the life I have – my wife, my family, my friends. And what I’ve been able to accomplish in my life, it’s very, very satisfying.”
It’s important, especially in the midst of such a major life challenge, to stay positive.
“I try to tell people, concentrate on what you do have,” he says. “Look at all the blessings – you’ve got a wife and family and grandkids. Don’t waste a day being petrified with worry. Worrying never helped anybody. There’s no sense in fear. Try to recognize that someday you’re going to die, and you’ve got to live the best way you can.”
Source:: canada.com
