When the doctor started making a chopping motion just under Matthew Fleming's left knee and talking about amputations, the weight of his situation really hit him.
Earlier that day, in June of 2014, he was blissfully unaware that he even had cancer.
Fleming, 33, had just finished recording the bass tracks for Terra Lightfoot's then-new record, Every Time My Mind Runs Wild. After 18 years of slogging it out as a musician, it finally looked like he was going to get to live his dream.
Then the phone call came.
Just before the recording process started, he'd had an MRI on his foot. Years before, he blocked a shot playing beer league hockey, and the pain never really went away. A lump had formed, and doctors thought it was a cyst.
'Being pushed into that operating room was the scariest time of my life.'
- Matthew Fleming
On the phone, he was told to come to the clinic for a follow up. No one mentioned anything about a diagnosis.
That changed quickly when a doctor approached him.
"He started off and said, 'So, with tumours like this," Fleming said. "I didn't even know I had cancer."
No one told him. They all assumed he knew — and that's how he found out his life was about to change.
Amputation comes as a shock
As quickly as the first blow came, a second one hit. He had synovial sarcoma, a rare, soft-tissue cancer that usually occurs in the legs or arms.
He had it in his foot, and the doctors said they needed to amputate. "The doctor said, 'I can do it next week,'" he remembers.
Even worse — it was basically a year to the day that he lost his own father to cancer.
Fleming (right) playing bass in Terra Lightfoot's band back in 2013. (Adam Carter/CBC)
"I went to the lake with my family, and it was just total silence the whole time on the way," he said. "Eventually, I managed to come to terms with it.
"I was worried that after making this great record and pouring my heart and soul into this, I might not be able to be part of the touring."
On July 24, he was wheeled into the operating room. An anaesthesiologist looked at him deadpan and said, "You look nervous."
That was an understatement. "Being pushed into that operating room was the scariest time of my life," he said.
In the end, the doctors ended up amputating most of his foot, leaving just the heel.
'All of a sudden I was in screaming pain'
Fleming came out of surgery a little loopy, and so drugged up that he didn't feel any pain. He convinced the doctors to let him go home that same day — which in hindsight was a poor choice.
"All of a sudden I was in screaming pain, and I had to be rushed back to the hospital," he said. He stayed there for five days, recovering.
That recovery wasn't easy. He lost a piece of himself. "I didn't really want to look at it too much," he said.
But he knew he wanted to keep playing live. He played Supercrawl 2014 on James Street North, sitting down in a chair. The next day, he started chemotherapy.
"People ask me what was worse, the chemo or the amputation, and I honestly don't know," Fleming said. "When I'd get blasted with chemo, it would make it hurt even more."
He also started two months of rehab, learning how to walk again with a prosthetic. It was while in rehab that his outlook changed.
"I was easily the least worse off person. Some people there were missing full limbs," he said. "As sad and as beat up as I was, that's when it changed.
"I could've lost my whole leg. I could be dead."
Through intense support from his family and his girlfriend, Fleming started making progress — moving from crutches to two canes, and then eventually to one.
Getting back on stage
All the while he had his eyes on the stage. He believed in the record he had been a part of, and wanted to make sure he was the one to help bring it to people live.
"That really drove me to want to be able to do this."
And so he did. Less than a year after his surgery, Fleming was on tour with the rest of the Terra Lightfoot band on a Canadian tour. This summer was no different, as Lightfoot and co. were on the road for a busy festival season.
In the end, he didn't miss a single show.
It was while opening for Blue Rodeo on tour early this year that just how lucky he was hit him. Fleming went from being wheeled into the operating room to gracing the same stage as Canadian music legends, all in just over a year.
This fall he's heading to Europe for shows in Germany, France and England — and he'll be doing it cancer free, and walking without a cane.
Coming to terms with his amputation is still a work in progress. Last summer he didn't wear shorts, concerned about what people would think of his bulky prosthesis.
This summer, he's wearing shorts. People do notice his prosthetic foot, he says. He can't help but see the stares, sometimes.
"But I just don't care anymore."
Hamilton bassist overcomes amputation, cancer to tour the world
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