The sound of steel meeting ice. The cold air coming through your pads. The feeling of stick on puck.
Once hockey is in your blood, there’s something magical about each time you step on the ice. It feels like a second home, one where the stresses of everyday life disappear.
It’s especially true once the feeling gets taken away.
For Tanner Sabau, that happened this past year when he was diagnosed with mesenchymal chondrosarcoma, an aggressive, rare form of cancer. For someone that grew up around the sport, playing for the AAA Blue Jackets and then in high school, one of the toughest things about his cancer battle over the past year was it meant the simple feeling of stepping on the ice was taken away from him.
So you can imagine how he felt this fall when he first got back on the ice after surgery, 14 rounds of chemotherapy and 25 radiation treatment sessions.
“I was happy and excited, of course, but didn’t know how good it was going to feel to get back on the ice until I finally did it,” he said. “My first few steps, it was wonderful. It was like, ‘It’s so nice to be back out here.’ It was tough, I couldn’t do the things I wanted to normally, but just being back on the ice, I started craving it again.
“The next week, I went out again, and then I realized half my pads are too small, so I had an excuse to get brand new pads.”
As you can see, Sabau has been able to maintain a sense of humor and perspective, more so than the average 22-year-old facing an unexpected fight for his life. This Thanksgiving, as the NHL celebrates Hockey Fights Cancer Month, he can give thanks for his health, including the fact he’s able to lace up the skates when he wasn’t sure it would be possible again.
After all, one of the constants in his life and his journey was the sport of hockey.
An Introduction to the Sport
Sabau grew up around sports, as his father, Jamie, was the longtime team photographer for the Blue Jackets and his mother, Diana, worked at various roles in Ohio State’s athletic department before becoming the athletic director at Utah State.
Tanner found himself playing such sports as baseball and football as a kid, but he said none really clicked with him. Then, during one of the NHL lockouts, there wasn’t as much for Jamie to do, so Tanner wanted to get on the ice and see if hockey could be his thing.
The first issue? Neither one of them could even skate at the time.
“I asked Dad if I could learn how to skate, and neither one of us knew how to,” Sabau said. “He would just take me to the Easton Chiller and we would do the free skates. He self-taught himself, and I just held on to the wall. He would help me skate after, and after all that, I was like, ‘I really like this. Let’s get me into lessons.’”
It helped that the Sabaus enlisted the help of Lee Harris, the Blue Jackets skating consultant who works with everyone from the AAA program to the NHL squad. As Sabau got better at skating, he climbed up the ladder of local hockey, going from house leagues to travel hockey all the way to the Ohio AAA Blue Jackets.
He finished up competitive hockey playing for the Prowler Hockey Association, the Ohio Scholastic Hockey League squad for the southeastern high schools in Columbus, including Pickerington and Reynoldsburg. After that, he joined the Chiller adult leagues, as the hockey bug simply just doesn’t go away for most.
“I was bummed to be done with it, the competitiveness,” he said. “Being able to play now with them is great. You can play forever. We just had a guy on our team that was like 70 years old who just retired from his job and still playing with us. It’s amazing. I’d love to be able to do that.”
But in spring of this year, Sabau had to leave the ice after his cancer diagnosis. He spent months unsure if he’d ever be able to play again, before doctors recently gave him the OK to get back to skating.
When he first heard the words no one wants to hear, Sabau’s mind immediately went to the sport he loves.
“I remember the day I got diagnosed, I was supposed to have a game, and I was like, ‘I’m going to go to the game. I need something to take my mind off of it,’” he said. “I was in a bit of denial. But somehow, I don’t know if it was the time change or something because it was in March, but I input the game on my calendar wrong. I ended up being an hour late, so I ended up missing the game.
“But that worked out well because the next day I had a meeting with my doctors, and they were like, ‘You can’t play hockey. You can’t have any contact in that area.’”
A Stunning Diagnosis
Perhaps fittingly, hockey had a hand in Sabau realizing he had cancer.
Last fall, he first noticed an unusual bump on his leg, something he thought might be a lingering bruise from a rec league game. With a full schedule including pursuit of his degree in aerospace engineering at Ohio State, he kept putting off getting it checked, much to the chagrin of his then-girlfriend and now fiancée Kirsten.
Then, in January, he was playing in a game when he turned the wrong way in the neutral zone and collided with another player. Fearing he had a concussion, Sabau made an appointment the next day to get checked out at Ohio State’s student health center. He was all clear on concussion symptoms, but while he was there, he asked the doctor to take a look at the issue with his leg.
“I was like, ‘OK, cool. If we have some extra time, can you take a look at this bump on my leg?’” Sabau said. “I roll up my pant leg and I show her and she feels it. Immediately, she goes, ‘I’m more concerned about this bump than if you have a concussion.’ I was like, ‘Oh boy, that’s not good.’”
He was quickly scheduled for an X-ray, which proved inconclusive. Doctors thought the bump might be a lingering calcification from a previous injury, but he was scheduled for an MRI, which showed a large, circular lump on his leg.
Sabau was then referred for a biopsy, and along the way, he noticed something that sounded strange at the time but proved prescient. As doctors reviewed his tests, they kept saying there was no reason to panic, but the word cancer kept popping up in their discussions.
“I was talking to Dad one time, saying, ‘I don’t know why they were talking to me as though I was a 21-year-old with cancer, but nothing has been diagnosed yet,’” he said. “All the doctors saw (the scans) and they wrote ‘inconclusive evidence,’ but they were probably like, this kid has cancer. Now I’m like, ‘That’s why they were talking to me like this.’ They just needed to get the biopsy to know what’s going on.”
When the tests came back, it showed one of the rarest forms of cancer, an aggressive chondrosarcoma found most often in young adults. The treatments would have to match the cancer in terms of aggressiveness, and on March 6 – two days before his 22nd birthday – Sabau found out the news he’d be starting chemotherapy within the next two weeks.
A Months-Long Battle
As Sabau noted, it was probably a good thing he didn’t go to his hockey game that first night, and doctors immediately went to work. There’s no set treatment for mesenchymal chondrosarcoma, with some combination of surgery, chemotherapy and radiation the line of attack depending on how the tumor responds to the therapy.
After four rounds of chemo, scans showed the tumor hadn’t grown but hadn’t shrunk, either, so doctors decided he would need radiation. His 25 sessions were crammed into a month of treatments, but follow-up scans showed the same thing – the tumor was still around the same size, meaning surgery would be the next option.
The good news came after the procedure, which showed that not only were there clear margins, the tumor was in 100 percent necrosis.
“Everyone was ecstatic because that rarely happens for something like this, especially because it wasn’t shrinking,” Sabau said. “For it to come back 100 percent dead, we must have done something right, so that was wonderful to hear.”
Through the entire process, Sabau had the athlete’s attitude of taking everything one day at a time, and he was able to establish a routine that helped him get through treatments. A big part of it was school – Sabau stayed on track academically and completed his undergraduate degree at Ohio State in May. He was at the James Cancer Hospital for inpatient treatment on campus at OSU the day of the commencement ceremony in Ohio Stadium, but Brutus Buckeye dropped by his room and one of his professors delivered his degree.
After surgery, he still had some chemotherapy sessions to complete, and this fall, he received a clean bill of health, with scans scheduled every few months to make sure the cancer doesn’t return. Looking back, it’s still hard to believe everything that happened.
“Still, there’s times I’m just in the car by myself, and I’m like, ‘Wow, I’m a 22-year-old who just went through cancer. That’s crazy,’” he said. “Right when I got diagnosed, I talked to the doctor and he left, and I was just freaking out. I was looking in the mirror talking to myself and was like, ‘Oh my God, I have cancer.’ I would have never fathomed that it could happen.”
Community Support
For many who go through cancer, one of most heartening aspects of the battle is the support that almost immediately materializes.
It was no different for Sabau, who quickly started to get messages from people he hadn’t heard from in quite some time. That was especially true in the hockey community, and the Prowler Hockey Association even organized a fundraiser to help the Sabau family offset his medical bills.
“That was the crazy thing for me,” he said. “Going through hockey and playing hockey, you get to know a lot of people. That’s probably the thing I like best about the hockey community is you become friends with all these people you’ve played with.
“That really just came out when I got diagnosed, is all these people I met throughout my life, no matter if it was a close friend or a passerby, all of them came out to help support me in any way they can. That felt great, and it was really nice to know there are people out there to help you.”
Sabau isn’t fully back on the hockey rink yet, as though he has skated a few times, he is still working his way back to 100 percent. He hopes to rejoin a Chiller league once the new session starts after the first of the year, with the new pads in tow.
Through his entire journey, Sabau was able to keep perspective and keep on fighting. While he wouldn’t want to go through it again, he’s been able to take some memorable experiences from the toughest time in his life.
“It’s not an experience I’d ever want to live again, but I’m almost glad I did it,” he said. “I’m not glad in a sense that I wanted to go through it, but I got so much out of it, just knowledge wise and meeting new people and the community I had a chance to meet. It made the experience better. That was a good outcome.”
