John and Dawn Carr were getting antsy.
Last summer, Drew Carr (Medway, Mass.), their son, was at a summer skills session. Carr was in the middle of a 2-on-1, twisted and felt something pop in his ribs.
He went to the orthopedic center at Boston Children’s Hospital. First, Carr was sent for an X-ray. Then came an MRI, where they discovered a stress fracture on his rib. It would take six weeks to heal.
It was a devastating blow for Carr, who was set to begin his junior year at St. Mark’s and spent all offseason getting bigger, faster and stronger in hopes of a big season.
It would pale in comparison to what came next.
Along with the stress fracture, the doctors noticed something funky on the rib and advised Carr to get a CAT scan. The initial thought was that it was just a bone cyst and to wait six weeks for the bone to heal to see if it would go away. Carr, who wanted to make sure he was ready for hockey season, wanted them to biopsy the rib immediately.
The Carr parents were anxious because it had been two weeks since the biopsy was done and no one had called with the results.
“I had been making calls like, ‘What’s going on? Why is nobody calling me with these results?’” Dawn said. “They knew we were a little antsy for them.”
On Sept. 11, the doctors finally called Dawn back. It was non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma. Cancer.
“What do we do?” Dawn remembered saying. “What do we even do?”
Delivering bad news
One of their first calls was to St. Mark’s boys head hockey coach Carl Corazzini, who was walking into his house after a day of school.
“I don’t often get phone calls [from parents] saying I need to talk to you,” Corazzini said.
Dawn gave Corazzini the news. She wanted someone who was with Drew every day at school to know.
“All this other stuff goes out the window,” Corazzini said. “The hockey, the school — it just becomes about supporting Drew and the family and whatever we could do for him as a group.”
But first, John and Dawn Carr needed to tell Drew. It took the parents roughly 24 hours to bring themselves to tell their son.
“We lost a lot of sleep and shed a lot of tears,” Dawn said. “We just couldn’t find the right words.”
What helped get them to eventually tell him was that a nurse practitioner from Dana Farber offered to answer all questions Drew had after they told him. At that point, they didn’t know what stage the cancer was — they were just told that it was non-Hodgkins Lymphoma. How curable the cancer was wouldn’t be known until after the positron emission tomography (PET) scan.
“It was just a lot to take in,” Drew Carr said. “It was probably the worst news I’ve ever been told in my life. But at the same time, I was like, ‘I got this.’ I was all fired up. I was like, ‘Let’s do this.’ It’s time to take this on.”
The next step was telling his friends at school, which Carr wanted to do immediately. Two days later, 24 of Carr’s closest friends, including 11 from the hockey team, were brought to a classroom on campus. They didn’t know why they were brought there.
“I kind of knew going in that whatever we were going to find out wasn’t good,” St. Mark’s senior captain Andrew Gibbons (South Kingstown, R.I.) said.
Carr delivered the news, explaining what had happened and what the next few months were going to bring.
It was an emotional room, with some crying and some sitting in shock, never having experienced cancer up close like this. Gibbons intentionally sat between sophomores Jack Taylor (Framingham, Mass.) and Evan Nee (Arlington, Mass.) with his arms around them.
“I think the best part that I took away from that is that’s when I really found out how awesome my friends were and how great my teammates are,” Carr said. “I was obviously crying. I left the room for like five minutes, I came back and then we just sat there in that room. All the teachers left that were there. We just sat there and we had a genuine conversation for like an hour.
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“I thought it was going to be awkward because that’s a hard position to be put in. But the way they handled it and the support they gave me in that meeting in that room like that. I really found out how good of a group it is and how much they mean to me and how much I needed them.”
As the meeting wrapped up, Carr laughed and let the group know he was going to be bald.
“That kind of put us all at ease,” Gibbons said. “We were laughing walking out of there. I think by the time we got out of the building, we all kind of exchanged looks and I don’t really think anything else needed to be said.”
The 11 hockey players, along with a majority of the male population at St. Mark’s, shaved their heads. Players from other prep schools like Nobles, St. George’s and St. Sebastian’s also joined in to support Carr, who’s also a member of the Boston Little Bruins.
“It made me laugh,” Carr said. “It made me feel great.”
The treatment
For Carr to get a treatment plan, he had to undergo those PET scans, as well as other tests, to determine the severity of the cancer. The results would take two more weeks to come back.
“I would say those two weeks were the scariest because what happens if they came back and say there’s nothing we can do?” John Carr said. “We were up for the whole two weeks barely sleeping.”
When the results came in, it was the best-case scenario – stage one and caught early. It was deemed very curable, which meant four cycles of chemotherapy treatment at the Jimmy Fund Clinic in Boston.
The first treatment was an eye-opener for Carr — leaving his house in Medway, Mass., with his parents at 6 a.m., and going through rounds of appointments before starting the actual treatment at 10:30 a.m. That would run until around 6 p.m.
For all that time, the drugs ran through an IV and into him. Carr was no stranger to IVs, as he’s gone to Children’s Hospital every month since he was 9 years old for an infusion of medicine for ulcerative colitis.
“I literally was shaking,” Carr said. “I felt like I had the flu. It was probably the most suffering I’ve ever gone through in my life because my body wasn’t used to these nasty drugs.”
As bad as the first time was, Carr felt fine the next day, continuing to work out. He had treatments planned for the next two Wednesdays to complete the first cycle. After that, each treatment would allow for a two-to-three-week recovery period.
That was when the side effects kicked in. Carr lost his hair, lost weight and became much weaker. He was often exhausted. Vomiting and swelling persisted during the night.
“Mentally, that was hard for me because I worked hard all spring and summer to put on weight and muscle,” Carr said. “Watching first-hand that just get taken away from me was pretty hard.”
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But Carr had a strategy that he got from his mother to help him: finding one positive thing each day.
“She gave me that pep talk,” Carr said. “I’m 17 years old. It’s easy to feel sorry for yourself and especially in a moment like this because it’s just honestly not fair. No one should go through this no matter how old you are. I would never do it in public but I would come home and it would be hard for me to not feel sorry for myself a little bit and be frustrated.
“But she would tell me to just find the one positive and that’s how you win each day.”
Some days, that positive was seeing his friends at St. Mark’s. Even when he didn’t attend classes, St. Mark’s still allowed him to skate on the rink by himself.
“He’d be doing chemo on Wednesday and on Thursday he’d want to do conditioning drills,” Corazzini said. “I’d be like, ‘Can we just take it down a notch? Let’s shoot some pucks and have fun out there.’”
Carr’s final day of treatment was Nov. 29 — the day of St. Mark’s opening game at Milton Academy. He knew it would be the worst one. But the thought of being cancer-free shortly afterward was enough for him to want to take it on.
It didn’t make it any easier.
After feeling well enough to consider the idea of going to Milton at the end of his treatment, Carr’s parents, who accompanied him to every treatment, decided to just go home. It was a very smart move.
“He was vomiting within an hour,” Dawn said.
That continued through the night and the entire next day.
“I was so sick,” Carr said. “It was probably the worst day of my life.”
That was that Thursday. The next day, one more positive thing popped up: Corazzini called Carr to see if he was feeling well enough to come to the home opener against Dexter Southfield and surprise the team before the game. He was.
So, Corazzini gave the team a pre-game speech on heart and adversity with Carr hidden away from where the team could see him.
“Everything you want is on the other side of heart,” Corazzini said to his group. “This kid had the worst day of his life yesterday but he’s still here.”
Out came Carr. The room erupted.
The return and a new perspective
Since Carr’s treatment began, he had a date circled on the calendar: Jan. 6.
That was the day St. Mark’s played Tabor and the chemotherapy and cancer would be out of his system. It was also while his older brother, Jack, was still home before being redeployed in the army.
“I’m coming back for this game,” Carr said to those around him at the time. “I don’t care if I play one shift.”
The St. Mark’s community also didn’t care if Carr played more than a single shift — they just wanted to see him back, as was evident by the sheer number of people at that game.
“The crowd that showed up for that game was just a testament to Drew,” Gibbons said “I think there were lines of people in the waiting area because they couldn’t get into the rink. That’s how many people wanted to see Drew and that’s how much he means to this community.”
Carr played a lot more than one shift. After being in the starting lineup, the junior notched two assists, helping his team earn a 6-3 win.
“There are no words, to be honest,” Dawn said of his return.
Since then, Carr has fit into the St. Mark’s top six, posting one goal and five points in his eight games. His role in the locker room hasn’t changed either, as Corazzini considered him the “heartbeat of the team,” even when he was an underclassman.
“I think people rally around him,” Corazzini said.
The same goals remain for Carr. He wants to someday play college hockey. Just like before, he will do whatever it takes to make that a reality. He’s a great student, too.
But his perspective has shifted.
“I want to live in the moment without worrying about what’s to come in the future or any of that,” he said. “Just to give it my all every day and be with all my friends. Who knows if I’ll ever be with them again after high school because we all go on different paths. Just take in every second of it and appreciate it.”
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That goes for hockey as well.
“You look at hockey development,” Carr said. “You can say ‘Oh let’s go play college hockey. That’s my dream.’ And that is my dream. But right now, after everything I went through, I’ve kind of put that aside. I just want to enjoy every second of hockey.”
The fight has changed Carr, his family and those around him at St. Mark’s. It even changed how his parents viewed him.
“For me it did,” John Carr said. “He’s definitely the toughest kid I know.”
