Ryan Kiedrowski
Local Journalism Initiative Reporter
The World-Spectator
Last week, Rick and Erin Heise were looking forward to a weekend at home.
Such a simple, ordinary wish that signifies an important point in the much-loved Esterhazy teacher’s medical journey.
“We are on our way home with a weekend pass,” Erin explained in a phone interview with the World-Spectator on July 11. “He’s been in the Pasqua (Hospital in Regina) since middle of June. A couple weeks ago, they told us that it was incurable, that they wanted to stop the radiation. They put a pause on the radiation, and they were going to revisit it on Monday. That was a Thursday, and by Monday, he had gotten quite a bit better—better enough that they could continue with the radiation.
“It’s just been like a roller coaster,” Erin continued. “We just go up and down and kind of all around here.”
Right now, Rick is battling a very rare solitary fibrous brain tumour—literally a one in a million type of diagnosis.
“Normally, a solitary fibrous tumour does not get to the brain,” Erin explained. “It normally will hit other parts of your body—mostly they say the lining of the lungs. The site most often hit with a solitary fibrous tumour is the pleura (thin membrane surrounding the lungs that line the chest cavity). It can hit other parts of the body, but it is very rare to get one on the brain. ”
With so few cases, that also means far less research and clinical trials on these types of brain tumours. As for treatment, radiotherapy is the only option for Rick.
“If over the weekend, everything goes okay, then they’ll consider discharge on Tuesday, but he still has treatments all the way to the end of July,” Erin said. “He’s got a lot of treatments left and it’s far from over.”
Being grateful for every moment together with a ‘one day at a time’ approach, the couple couldn’t wait to hit the highway for home.
“He’s been in hospital for four weeks, so he can’t wait to go home,” Erin said. “That’s what’s best for everybody is to be at home.”
A long journey
This is actually Rick’s second brain tumour as his cancer journey began around one year ago. The couple had been noticing changes in Rick’s behaviour, and the original belief was he was diagnosed with depression. That was until Rick fell on Dec. 27, 2024, hitting the back of his head on a tile wall, which resulted in a CT scan being ordered on the following day.
“They found an 8 cm tumour on his frontal lobe,” Erin said, adding that he had a craniotomy in Saskatoon at the Royal University Hospital on Dec. 30. “They removed the entire tumour; there was nothing left, and the scans were all clear. He had quite a few scans before we left the hospital, and they were clear.”
It is impossible to diagnose a brain tumour without a head CT scan, something the Heise’s were trying to have done much sooner.
“We were pushing to get the head CT, but it takes too long to get one in our medical system,” Erin said. “We were starting to make arrangements to fly to Calgary to pay for one. We are glad that we did not do that though, because the air pressure during flight can have impacts on a large brain tumour, but we didn’t know he had a brain tumour at the time.”
“Even with this growing in his head, he still seemed somewhat normal, but yet, there were times where things were not normal and something was just not right,” she recalled. “But a lot of the symptoms of major depressive disorder mimic the symptoms of a brain tumour.”
Subsequent scans over the next few months had showed traces of malignancy, but were mostly benign.
Until Rick’s May 11 scan, which did find something.
“It was already back in eight weeks,” Erin said, noting that sometime between March 1 and May 11, the tumour returned. “It came back and it came back to being large again.”
A second tumour was discovered measuring 5.7 cm, much to the surprise of Rick’s medical team. This second tumour could not be biopsied because surgery was not an option.
“Solitary Fibrous tumours can be both malignant or benign, but quite often they are benign,” Erin explained. “The neurosurgeon stated that this tumour is a ‘bad actor’.”
The presence of the second tumour was certainly something nobody expected to see, given the previous clear scans.
“The doctors didn’t expect it to come back like that. Nobody did,” Erin said. “We thought we were clear. We thought everything was good, but when he had that MRI on the 11th of May, I read the report and I knew that it was not good.”
Rick was contacted by the Allan Blair Cancer Centre in Regina after the neurosurgeon in Saskatoon decided he could not do surgery on the tumour.
“His oncologist in Regina decided to try radiation because that was about all that we had left to try,” Erin explained. “This type of tumour, it’s either radiation or surgery, and because the surgery wasn’t an option, we had to try radiation.”
‘He’s the best teacher’
Rick has been teaching at Esterhazy High School since 1999, and recently took on the role of vice-principal in the fall of 2023. His sports involvement has be extensive through coaching volleyball, curling, and baseball. He also led the football crew chain and was a big part of district track and field meets. EHS students also benefitted greatly from Rick’s interest in computer science and technology, in addition to his authentically generous and compassionate personality.
“He’s an incredible teacher,” Erin says. “The kids all love him, the parents love him, he’s amazing at what he does and even with something growing in his head that we didn’t know about, he still did a remarkable job that year as a vice-principal.”
The shock of how not one, but two brain tumours could impact her husband is befuddling to Erin.
“Rick is the smartest person I’ve ever known,” she said. “He could figure anything out; he’s very intelligent, and that he ended up with a tumour … it’s very stressful and just stunning. Why is this happened to him, of all people? It’s so incredibly rare and he’s fit—he lift weights, he jogs, we eat right, he’s so active and then it hits him.”
Another ode to Rick’s impact on the community can be noted in the overwhelming response of a GoFundMe campaign, which garnered over $23,000 (85 per cent of the goal) in less than a week.
“Erin has been by her husband’s side every step of this medical journey,” noted Rebecca Banga, who began the GoFundMe campaign. “Some days are better, some days are harder. We have faith that the specialists are doing everything possible to treat Rick, and that the treatments will let him come home soon.”
