Avalanche president Pierre Lacroix Wednesday confirmed he had a major scare this summer, when doctors feared a mass in his spine might be cancerous or an indication of another serious disease.
After hospital stays in the Las Vegas area and in Denver, plus two visits to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., Lacroix finally got the good news on Aug. 18: The mass isn’t a tumor.
He returned to work at the Avalanche office in the Pepsi Center last week, under a schedule that reflects his relinquishment of the general manager’s duties and also doctors’ orders.
Lacroix emphasized that he was grateful for the “unbelievable” support of the Kroenke Sports and Avalanche organizations during the ordeal, and that the scare had nothing to do with his decision to step down as GM. He said this all began a week after the hiring of Francois Giguere as Lacroix’s successor.
The scare lasted so long because a biopsy in the spine area is so risky it is a last resort, performed only when the likelihood of cancer is determined to be high. But Lacroix said doctors finally were able to rule out cancer and other serious illnesses after he underwent so many tests that he lost count of the number.
“You’re in a long period of knowing nothing, or imagining the worst,” Lacroix said. “I had a mass, and still have a mass, in my back. They said to me that it could be from so many things. It could be from a virus or a disease, or it could be a tumor.”
A tumor could have meant “cancer.”
“No doubt the worst things go through your mind,” Lacroix said. “It was very tough on my wife and my family, but the outcome is great.”
Lacroix said the scare began at his Las Vegas-area home on the night of June 2, a few hours after his wife, Colombe, fired her first hole-in-one on the golf course. He had discomfort in his stomach and back, and when he couldn’t sleep, he called his longtime friend and Nevada neighbor, René Angelil, singer Celine Dion’s husband.
“He’s had two heart attacks and I asked him, ‘What are the symptoms?”‘ Lacroix said. “He said, ‘Burning sensation in the stomach and back pain.”‘
Angelil was alarmed and took his friend to a Las Vegas-area hospital. Lacroix stayed there several days and underwent an angiogram and other tests that determined he didn’t have a heart problem. “They told me I had ‘the Lance Armstrong’ heart,” Lacroix said with a laugh.
After an MRI, Lacroix was still having such severe pain doctors agreed it was best for him to return to Denver for more tests under the supervision of Avalanche team doctors and neurologist Stan Ginsburg. Lacroix spent two weeks in the intensive care unit at Rose Medical Center. He joked that at one point, he had been given so many steroids he would have flunked any professional sports league’s drug tests. “I had all the symptoms of something bad in my spine,” Lacroix said. “That’s why I was in such pain. … They told me they gave the maximum amount of medication my body would take, thinking they would shrink that mass. It didn’t work.”
Doctors gradually ruled out various serious diseases, including multiple sclerosis. Still, cancer was considered a possibility until spine specialists at the Mayo Clinic concluded after yet more tests that a biopsy wasn’t necessary, that the mass wasn’t cancerous.
“They told me they would have to monitor it, and that I might have another reaction like I had a few months ago, but that there was, in their opinion, no need to go in for any kind of surgery,” Lacroix said.
“You can’t call it a tumor. You don’t know why it hits. It hit me and created this malformation of the spine. People live with pain in the back, and there’s nothing wrong with that.”
The alternatives were a lot worse.
Staff writer Terry Frei can be reached at 303-954-1895 or tfrei@denverpost.com
