Watching his father walk around for two months with a golf-ball-sized lump bulging out from atop the carotid artery in his neck was more than Ben Brauer, his mother, or his sisters could bear.
They’d pleaded with the strapping 6-foot-3 onetime water polo player with the West German national team to go see a doctor, but he shrugged them off insisting he felt fine. Brauer, then only 16 and the youngest member of their family in his native German city of Duisburg, even tried putting a guilt trip on his father, Frank, about not loving his children enough to take care of himself.
“I’d be trying to guilt him into it,” said Brauer, 28, a Kraken premium sales and data analytics specialist. “I’d tell him ‘It’s not like you’re doing it just for you. You’d be doing it for your family. Your friends. We want you to be here for us. We don’t want to lose you just because you won’t go to the doctor.’
“But he’d just brush it off and say it didn’t hurt. Or, that he’d go soon. And every week would be the same thing. That he’d be going soon. But he’d never go.”
Finally, his sister, Katja, who worked at a local gym, approached a cancer specialist client she knew and described her dad’s symptoms to him. The doctor arranged for an expedited appointment that otherwise might have taken months and what turned out to be a cancerous lymphoepithelial tumor was soon surgically removed.
It turned out the tumor wasn’t the primary one, which doctors were unable to locate. So, after tests and further exploratory surgery, they embarked upon extensive, often grueling chemotherapy and radiation treatments to destroy any further cancer that hadn’t been spotted.
“Luckily, it never came back,” Brauer said of his dad being cancer-free for nearly 12 years. “But if my sister didn’t know that doctor, who basically made it easy for him, then yeah, he probably wouldn’t have gone. Maybe at some point, he might have, but luckily, we were able to get him that appointment quickly.”
Patient awareness and early detection are key themes of this season’s Hockey Fights Cancer, pres. by Virginia Mason Franciscan Health during the Kraken’s game on Nov. 20 against the Nashville Predators at Climate Pledge Arena. VMFH staff will set up a kiosk on-site at the arena where men can get their blood drawn for a PSA test to screen for prostate cancer.
And Brauer, himself a nationally recognized former German water polo player like his dad, has seen firsthand how difficult it can be to persuade others to proactively do what’s best for their health.
He recognizes that his father, who would have competed at the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow had West Germany not been part of the U.S.-led boycott, got off relatively lucky. But he wonders whether he’d have been spared some post-surgical side effects from the chemotherapy and radiation had he gone in earlier before the tumor got as big as it did.
“For about a year, he couldn’t taste any food,” Brauer said, adding the radiation was intensive, highly concentrated, and damaged skin and tissue over a significant portion of his father’s neck. “It also went to his ears, so he was having a harder time of hearing through all of that. And he had problems with his jaw and teeth as well because the radiation was right on his neck.
“So, that really wore him down,” he added. “He lost a lot of weight – I’d say about 40 pounds – and it was even hard for him to swallow for more than a year.”
But even after all that, his father still had to be prodded to go to his regular cancer check-ups. Up to now, a decade later, the cancer hasn’t returned. Still, his mother, Andrea, has to keep after his dad to keep up his doctor visits back in Germany.
“Part of the problem is he doesn’t share stuff – he’s not that talkative,” Brauer said. “He doesn’t talk about when he’s in pain or something is going on. He just keeps it to himself. I’m always trying to get him to talk more and be more open.
“And fortunately, my mom also knows him very well and can tell when something is off. So, that helps.”
