EDMONTON — It’s almost impossible to comprehend what the Stelter family has been through.
It’s nearly as impossible to calculate the impact they have had on the fight against cancer.
Ben Stelter became an inspiration for Connor McDavid, the Edmonton Oilers and the entire hockey community while he battled glioblastoma, a type of brain cancer.
His postgame victory phrase of “Play ‘La Bamba,’ baby,” became a rallying cry for Oilers fans everywhere. Four months after his death on Aug. 9, 2022, at the age of 6, the Ben Stelter Foundation was formed with a focus on providing magical experiences for kids with cancer, providing needed medical equipment at home, and supporting medical research.
The fight wasn’t over.
In March 2023, Ben’s dad, Mike, started to feel intense back pain with some “tingling down my leg.”
“I went to the doctor,” Mike Stelter said. “It seemed like it was possibly a slipped disk or something down my back, but every treatment we were trying was either not helping or making it worse. I finally had an MRI done and that’s when they realized a tumor was forming on my spine.”
He was diagnosed with sarcoma. To combat the cancer, Stelter needed to undergo proton therapy, a more accurate way of combating cancer cells in the body.
But there was a problem — that treatment was not available anywhere in Canada. In fact, he would need to travel to the Roberts Proton Therapy Center at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia — more than 2,000 miles away – to fight his cancer. He would need to go for eight weeks, leaving behind his wife, Lea, and daughters Dylan and Emmy.
“Being separated from the family during that time was incredibly hard,” Stelter said. “The girls were in school, we couldn’t pull them out of school for a couple of months, that would be so hard to do for them and unfair for them. But it was tough.
“The treatment itself was easy and painless, I was in and out in about 30 minutes every day. I didn’t feel anything while treatment was happening, it was easy, but getting there and going through all of that on your own, was hard.”
Even before he was diagnosed, Mike, through Ben’s foundation, had been working on the idea of investing in a proton therapy clinic in Edmonton, which would be the first of its kind in Canada. Even before it had immediately impacted him, he was working for a way to make it easier on others.
“We were so fortunate with the support of the community we were able to make it work to go down for treatment,” Mike Stelter said. “There are so many families where that’s the only option for them to go for treatment, out of country in the United States and they’re unable to go, and that’s incredibly unfair.
“After that, we are even more driven to bring proton therapy to Canada, knowing that families [having] to go through this is incredibly unfair and the amount of families that we’ve met since then where they said they had to travel to the United States for proton therapy or they know somebody that’s had to, is unbelievable. There is such a huge need for this treatment in Canada right now.”
