Hurricanes fan says hockey helped her fight cancer

To celebrate the 25th anniversary of Hockey Fights Cancer, the NHL is sharing stories of those in the hockey world impacted by the disease on the 25th of each month all season long. Today, the story of Stella Adams, a cancer survivor and longtime Carolina Hurricanes fan, and her daughter, Danielle Adams.

RALEIGH, N.C. -- Stella Adams apologized in advance to people sitting next to her for “hollering and carrying on” when the Carolina Hurricanes hosted the New Jersey Devils at PNC Arena on Jan. 25.

It was Adams’ first hockey game in-person in nearly a decade, and nothing was going to stop the 65-year-old Durham, North Carolina, resident from screaming, shouting, dancing and cheering on her beloved Hurricanes.

Her daughter, Danielle, sat to her right with her 2 1/2-year-old daughter Layla, at her first hockey game, sitting on her lap. It was a party, three generations enjoying a fun night at the game.

“Oh, it was the best,” Adams said. “(Layla), at first, was just clapping but then she got the prompts, and she would go, ‘Let’s go Canes!’ Oh, that was priceless, because ‘Caniacs,’ we’re a demonstrative group of fans. She got to understand all of our moves.”

The night was also a celebration of Stella surviving multiple myeloma, an incurable but treatable cancer of the body’s plasma cells, the white blood cells that make antibodies that fight infection.

It’s a rare form of cancer that impacts Black people at twice the rate of whites, according to the National Cancer Institute.

Diagnosed while visiting Washington, D.C., in 2015, Stella was sapped of her normally boundless energy, inflicted with debilitating pain, robbed her of the ability to attend Hurricanes games and nearly lost her life.

“There were a couple of times when I saw the Grim Reaper, but I decided to kick him to the curb,” she said. “But he came close a couple of times during this journey.”

Stella is in remission, thanks to her doctors at the Duke Cancer Center, the support of her family, her faith, and her love of hockey.

Teclistamab, a drug approved by the Food and Drug Administration on Oct. 25, 2022, and prescribed by doctors at Duke, is helping keep Stella’s cancer at bay.

She said hockey helped her get through the pain, the hair loss from chemotherapy, the stem cell transplant, the worries and the down days the cancer brought before the medication was prescribed.

“Watching a Hurricanes game is a very good way of killing time when you’re in bed,” said Stella, who served as a soil and water conservation supervisor for Durham from 1988-2000 and is former executive director of the North Carolina Fair Housing Center. “It can get you a little motivated. You can shout and laugh. And there’s always a Staal to watch hitting a goal. It’s just exciting.”

Danielle, an advocacy adviser for Oxfam America who also served as a soil and water conservation district member, said hockey served as an icebreaker between she and her mother when they had to discuss her cancer.

“We would talk on the phone. I would call her from Colorado and I’m like, ‘Hey, what are you doing? Just watching the game?’” Danielle said. “That’s how we would start before we got into the sort of scary bits [such as], ‘What did the doctors say?’

“For us, it eased the weight of what we had to get to. It was the appetizer, the delicious treat, and then we could always wrap up the call with, ‘Well, I’ll let you get back to the game,’ and then we could follow up the next day on what we thought. ... It was good, especially if you didn’t have the answers or the updates or the wins in the cancer fight. We could talk about the wins on the screen and the wins of the game.”

Stella knew she liked hockey from the moment she saw the Raleigh IceCaps, an ECHL team that played at Dorton Arena on the North Carolina State Fairgrounds from 1991-98. Her love for the sport deepened when the Hartford Whalers moved to the state and became the Hurricanes prior to the start of the 1997-98 season.

She became a devoted, must-own-a-jersey, stark-raving Caniac when goalie Kevin Weekes joined the team in 2002.

Stella can recite Weekes’ NHL stats, especially from the Hurricanes’ run to the 2002 Stanley Cup Final, when they lost to the Detroit Red Wings in five games. Weekes played eight games (six starts) that postseason and went 3-2 with a 1.62 goals-against average, .939 save percentage and two shutouts.

“He was a megastar,” Stella said. “In our first Stanley Cup run, he was, like, major. As a Black player and playing at that level night after night, he was just awesome. I wanted my kids, who weren’t hockey fans at the time, to see him. Kevin Weekes is the reason they’re hockey fans.”

One of her daughter’s first big purchases after graduating from North Carolina Central University in 2010 was Hurricanes season tickets. Her passion for hockey continued when she moved to Denver in 2020. She cheers for the Colorado Avalanche, except for when they play Carolina.

Danielle became active in the Black Girl Hockey Club, a nonprofit group that seeks to inspire and sustain passion for hockey within the Black community, specifically among Black women, and to provide access to the sport through education and scholarships.

When Weekes heard about Stella’s cancer battle and her family’s devotion to hockey, the ESPN and NHL Network analyst surprised her with a FaceTime call the day after the Hurricanes’ 3-2 win against the Devils.

“I don’t even have words, I don’t even have words,” Stella said.

“I’m so glad to see you looking great and certainly feeling solid, and that’s the most important thing,” Weekes said. “I appreciate you being a longtime hockey fan. I understand you started watching with the ‘Canes during my time there.”

“You were kind of the reason for the seasons, OK?” she said.

Stella said she’s grateful for the NHL and NHL Players’ Association’s Hockey Fights Cancer initiative, which has raised more than $32 million in its 25 years to raise awareness of cancer and support those whose lives have been impacted by the disease.

HFC has partnered with the V Foundation for Cancer Research, which was founded in 1993 by the late North Carolina State University basketball coach and ESPN analyst Jim Valvano. The partnership is expected to dramatically increase fundraising to benefit cancer research.

“I would not be here, literally not be here, if it weren’t for clinical trials and being able to be part of one,” Stella said.

“Multiple myeloma victims, we need the research. We need to continue to have those breakthrough trials because we have that line that says it’s incurable and we need that research to find that cure. But we appreciate and are benefitting from the treatments. This is so far from where I was where the pain was unbearable to being pain-free, and that’s because of the research and the donations.”

Stella said she hopes to attend more Hurricanes games with her daughter and granddaughter, and hopefully make Layla a lifelong Carolina fan.

“They live in Denver, but her first game was a Canes game,” she said with a smile. “And your first love, you never forget.”