'It's just my life now. It's part of who I am'

Owen Brady's hockey dreams were dealt a devastating blow in 2018. Five years later and now cancer-free, Brady has a different perspective on life, but the same fighting spirit

Owen Brady on the roof of the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto on the day of his last visit there, the day he was officially declared cancer-free.

We interrupt this Stanley Cup final and the flurry of off-season NHL transactions to bring you a real-life story that actually matters in the grand scheme of things. A young man by the name of Owen Brady was declared cancer-free last week, ending an almost five-year journey that began with him being a 16-year-old who was looking forward to being a first-round pick in the Ontario Hockey League draft, and has culminated with him today as a 20-year-old man whose dreams and perspective have changed, but not his sense of determination and resilience.

Owen Brady will not give up on the dream of securing a Division I scholarship and playing professional hockey, not even after a form of cancer called osteosarcoma robbed him of his health and prime development years as a hockey player. That’s why he plans to return to the Carleton Place Canadians Jr. A team next season to play his overage year. But where he once dreamed of starring in the OHL and playing in the NHL, he’s now hoping to play hockey at a Canadian university, then pursue an education that will see him become a physiotherapist or chiropractor. He reckons he has spent so much time in hospitals, specifically the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto, that his future is somewhere doing health care.

“The No. 1 thing would be a Division I scholarship, but at this point in my career, that’s a little bit out of reach,” Brady said. “I don’t want to say it’s zero, but at this point USports would probably be the more realistic goal.”

This journey began in the summer of 2018 when Brady noticed a small bump in the upper part of his left shin. It wasn’t causing him any pain, so he ignored it because that’s what 15-year-old kids who have more important things going on in their lives do. He was in the midst of  preparing for his final season of Under-16 hockey with the Whitby Wildcats, where he was the team captain and a stud defenceman, and showcasing himself for the OHL draft. What started out as a trip to a walk-in clinic in November of 2018 to have the bump checked out days before he was to play in the Ontario Minor Hockey Association Under-16 Showcase and the prestigious Silver Stick Tournament, resulted in him being told he had a cancerous tumour in his leg and that he likely would never play hockey again because the surgery to remove the five-centimetre growth would be so invasive.

Brady with a fellow cancer fighter, a three-year-old girl named Roux.

And it didn’t get any easier from there. A surgical procedure that was supposed to take 12 hours required 19. Brady had the fibula removed from his right leg to replace the tibia in his left, which was carved out so the tumour could be removed. Then came months of draining rounds of chemotherapy treatment that caused his hair to fall out and sapped him of his energy. The week he likely would have been anchoring the defence corps for Team Ontario in the Canada Winter Games, he began his first chemotherapy treatment. When his team won the OMHA’s Under-16 championship later that season, he lifted the championship trophy while in a wheelchair. He on crutches when he was drafted in the sixth round, 106^th overall, by the Oshawa Generals in 2019, long after the top 20 picks where he was originally projected. Then came the pandemic, which set all young players back, but even more so Brady, who already hadn’t played in 16 months when COVID-19 hit and arenas all over Ontario were shuttered and leagues shut down.

It all seemed like a cruel joke, but Brady and his family chose to be grateful rather than bitter and resentful. Yes, cancer had changed everything in a big way, but if this had happened 30 years prior, the only treatment would have been amputation. And Brady and his parents, educators Chris and Deirdre, never, ever gave up. And the victories started coming. Where he once dreamed of dominating a blueline, Owen Brady began to see things like being able to comb his hair again after a shower as a triumph. He became an ambassador for the world-renowned Sick Kids hospital, inspired other young patients and spent some time with the Stanley Cup when then-St. Louis Blues defenceman Vince Dunn brought the trophy to the hospital and invited Brady as a special guest.

As soon as he was able, Brady was back on his feet, then his skates, working out harder than ever before to strengthen his leg and get back into hockey shape. What he was doing was basically unprecedented, coming back to play a high level of hockey after that kind of surgery, and he finally did it in the 2021-22 season when he cracked the roster of the Pickering Panthers, a juggernaut Jr. A team that made it within one victory of winning the Royal Bank Cup in 2022. He joined the Carleton Place Canadians last season and played the full campaign. The move to another place and another league allowed him to be Owen Brady, the hockey player, basically for the first time since he was 16. He grew a lot emotionally and physically and is working hard in the off-season to make the most of his final year of junior hockey in 2023-24.

With his parents, Deirdre and Chris, after playing his first game in almost three years, with the Pickering Panthers in the fall of 2021.

Life is rarely a linear path. Nobody knows that more than Owen Brady, who on May 31, made his last visit to Sick Kids, where he had spent so much time. He visited with the wonderful health care professionals with whom he had bonded, both on the eighth floor oncology department and the first floor orthopedic team. As he said his goodbyes, Owen Brady knew it was a wonderful day, but it was also a bittersweet one. Life is funny like that sometimes.

Brady has had some brief and informal conversations with Division III schools in the United States and McGill University in Montreal is a possibility, where he would be able to pursue both high-level academics and hockey. But right now, he’s concentrating on next season. He doesn’t feel lucky, nor does he feel unlucky. “It’s just my life now,” he said. “It’s a part of who I am. Sometimes I do reflect back on it and what could have been, but that can create its own set of problems, so I just focus on what I’m doing now. I can’t change what happened.”

At one point during his treatment, Brady wrote about his cancer battle in a paper he did for a Grade 12 class. In it, he wrote: “The word ‘cancer’ can be an intimidating word. To me, cancer represents fight. Fight till you cannot fight anymore. Put your head down and fight. I am just that, a fighter. I will not let my scars define me. I will see them as a representation of how I won my fight. I fought cancer. I beat cancer. I am a fighter.”