Toronto goaltender Erica Howe is pictured in Toronto on Jan. 17, 2023. Howe spent one season with the club as backup goalie to Kristen Campbell.Christopher Katsarov/The Canadian Press
Thursday began as a good day, and Erica Howe was grateful to feel like herself. She was scheduled for chemotherapy later in the afternoon, so the day was about to get tougher. For now, she was upbeat, and began sharing some deeply personal details about the past few months.
Howe retired in the spring after playing a one-year contract as a backup goalie for Toronto in the Professional Women’s Hockey League. She was set to resume her career as a firefighter in Mississauga. But shortly after Howe made the pivot this summer, the 32-year-old received a diagnosis that flipped her life upside down.
The goalie nicknamed Howie by players across the PWHL had breast cancer.
Talking about it feels a little uncomfortable for Howe, who shies away from the spotlight, but she wants to bring awareness to breast cancer, and raise funds for a cure. The Toronto Sceptres will focus on her battle during Saturday’s home game at Coca-Cola Coliseum against the Montreal Victoire. Her fellow Mississauga firefighters will attend, too, handing out toques for cancer donations.
Players across the league are already showing their support. Many arrive for PWHL games in a black tuque adorned with a pink ribbon and Howe’s No. 27, or use their social media to honour her. Howe has shared some of the vulnerable moments of her battle on Instagram.
“This is going to be a very hard journey, but I have the hockey community and the firefighting community and friends and family all supporting me,” Howe said during a Thursday call with a few reporters. “I wanted to help others, raise awareness or raise money to try and make a difference in someone’s life who maybe doesn’t have the support and resources that I have.”
Howe undergoes chemotherapy treatments every two weeks and she’s tired and nauseous in the days that follow. Some of the drugs make her frustrated, irritable and unable to think clearly. She rides an exercise bike at home, but she’s not able to play hockey, or fight fires.
Howe had big plans for this season. She wanted to stay in shape to be on call as a Sceptres’ emergency backup goalie, and she hoped to play forward in a local hockey league. Howe and her wife were hoping to get pregnant.
“The hardest part is all of that coming to a full stop,” Howe said. “I’m kind of at home. I can’t do these things. I physically can’t, I mentally can’t.”
Howe spent last season with PWHL Toronto, taking a temporary leave from her firefighting job to play in the new league. The Clarkson University product was the backup to Kristen Campbell and made three appearances – including two starts – going 1-1-0 with a .921 save percentage and a 1.89 goals-against average.
Previously, Howe played five seasons with the Markham Thunder of the Canadian Women’s Hockey League, where the native of Orleans, Ont., helped her team win the 2018 Clarkson Cup.
The close relationships she has forged in hockey and firefighting are key right now.
Howe was working at the fire station in July when she first had an inkling something might be wrong. She was brushing dust off the chest of her uniform – probably “jelly doughnut dust,” she laughs – when she felt a lump on her breast.
Howe was still thinking about that lump a short while later, when she took part in a summer road-hockey charity event held by Montreal PWHL star Laura Stacey. Surrounded there by long-time hockey friends she trusted, Howe opened up about it to a few of the women.
“I had a couple of the girls touch the lump and I was like, ‘what do you guys think this is? And everyone was kind of like, ‘go to the family doctor,’” Howe recalled. “And my wife was instrumental in that, too, being like, ‘Erica, book your appointment right now.’”
By August Howe saw her doctor, squeezing the visit into a busy life full of travel and friends’ summer weddings. She knew women who found lumps in their breasts that turned out to be harmless, so Howe was calm through mammograms, ultrasounds and biopsies.
On Aug. 26, Howe got the call during a shift – the lump was cancerous, she had invasive ductal carcinoma.
On Sept. 11 she had surgery to remove it – a sentinel lymph node biopsy.
Two weeks later, Howe learned the cancer had spread to her lymph nodes, so she needed chemo. Until then, she had kept the news to a small circle of people. Once she knew a longer battle was ahead, she chose to share the news publicly, using her platform to help others.
Back in October, the Mississauga Fire Department, teaming up with a group of Howe’s friends and teammates, held an event to show their support as she began chemo. Howe had long dark hair and knew it was possible she would lose it during her treatment. So, while surrounded by friends, with cameras filming, she cropped her hair into a short, fun hockey mullet. Howe asked her friend, Toronto backup goalie Carly Jackson, wearer of the most popular mullet in the PWHL, to cut the hair as her daunting treatment journey began.
“I feel a lot of gratitude that she chose me to do that for her,” Jackson recalled during the Sceptres media day. “Hair can be such a sensitive or meaningful way of expression, so the fact that I got to be in that moment with her was something I will remember forever.”
Howe’s fellow firefighters shaved their heads in solidarity. Her friend Jess Jones, a police officer who also played for PWHL Toronto last season, sat alongside Howe that day and cut her hair off, too.
“I said ‘Jonesy, you do not have to shave your head,’ and she was like,’ No, Howie, we’re in this together. I got you,’” Howe recalled.
Howe hasn’t been to a PWHL game this season, but will be at Saturday’s, tucked in a suite. Two days after a chemo treatment, she expects she might feel unwell.
“I’m looking for any kind of normalcy in my life right now,” Howe said. “So to be in the rink and to be in Coca-Cola especially, I think I’ll feel like home.”