After a cancer diagnosis at 25, Saints’ Foster Moreau shares his journey back to the field

Scars tell stories, and the inch-long line of discolored skin on Foster Moreau’s left clavicle tells quite the tale.

This isn’t a fun story. Sadness and anxiety are threaded through it. His identity as a professional football player was suddenly challenged with an uncertain future, and that was almost beside the point.

Moreau, at 25 years old, faced his own mortality.

This is a story Moreau needs to tell, though, and he’ll crack jokes at his own expense now that he’s on the other side. But he has to tell it, because he has the privilege of wearing a New Orleans Saints uniform, and responsibility comes with the platform.

Throughout the Saints’ Thursday night game against the Jacksonville Jaguars, the team will honor cancer survivors and those whose fight is still ongoing through the NFL’s Crucial Catch initiative, which aims to combat cancer through early detection.

Who better to serve as the public face of that than Moreau, who will play in that game seven months and one day after receiving his own cancer diagnosis? A diagnosis which, by the way, he only learned about because of a routine physical checkup, when the Saints’ team physician felt something concerning under his left clavicle.

Moreau does not want to be called some type of hero. He considers his path a piece of cake compared to the nightmare so many have to endure.

“I wasn’t about to ring any bell; I wasn’t about to do any celebrating,” Moreau said. “For me, that’s for the real fighters who really had to fight. Mine was a walk. It just happened at a bad time, and I was walking through a s****y part of town.”

What Moreau doesn’t allow himself to consider, at least publicly, is he may have a chance to play hero after all. Maybe, through sharing his experience with others, one person who really needs to hear it will decide to go see a doctor at the right time.

“Hopefully by him spreading this word he’ll save someone’s life,” said his mother, Tricia Hotard. “It could be one person’s life, but one person’s life is that important.”

***

In his own words, Moreau woke up Saturday, March 18, in New Orleans feeling “underslept and overwhelmed.” It was a thrilling and nerve-wracking time to be him.

Coming off the best season of his NFL career, he was a free agent for the first time and enjoying the spoils. The day before, he’d visited the Bengals in Cincinnati and had good conversations with his former LSU teammates Joe Burrow and Ja’Marr Chase about linking back up. Now, after a late-night flight into New Orleans, he was set to talk to his hometown Saints.

First, he’d need a physical. He had a 6 a.m. wakeup call at the Four Seasons hotel, and a driver was set to pick him up at 6:45 to take him to Touro Hospital. After the physical, he would get breakfast with some members of the Saints to talk about his potential role with the team.

Everything happened so fast he never made it to breakfast.

“When the physical starts, when the first thing (Saints team physician Dr. John Amoss) touches is my left clavicle, my left clavicle’s lymph node, it becomes a tough scene. He’s a little tripped out, he doesn’t really know everything that is going on, but he knows something’s wrong.”

In an interview with the Saints’ in-house media earlier this year, Amoss said, “I felt this abnormal gland and it’s like, ‘Have you ever noticed this before?’ He’s like, ‘No.’ And I said, we’ve got to check this out.”

They put Moreau through a CT scan and sent him upstairs to radiology, and before long, Amoss was talking to Moreau about Hodgkin’s Lymphoma — a form of cancer that spreads through the body’s lymph system.

Amoss and the radiologist started walking Moreau through the scan. The images flashed on the screen in front of Moreau, and they explained in detailed medical terms how his lymph nodes on his left side were enlarged.

“I’m like, ‘OK, that’s bad. That’s bad. That’s really bad. That’s really bad. That’s almost as bad as it gets,” Moreau said.

Amoss said they’d have to prove it was not cancer, and Moreau asked the chances he had cancer. Amoss told him “upper 90s.”

Moreau pulled up his phone and dialed his mother’s number to share the news. Tricia was surprised to see her son’s name on the caller I.D. an hour after his physical was supposed to start. Moreau fought his emotions when he shared the news.

“I have a high, 96, 97% chance of having Hodgkin’s Lymphoma cancer,” he recalled telling her. “Of course, in great mom fashion, she says, ‘Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, hold on now, we don’t have all the information. Let’s calm it down, let’s tone your blood pressure down, let’s figure out what’s going on.’

“So I said, ‘Right now I’m about to go back, they’re going to numb me up in my shoulder a little bit, they’re going to make a small little incision, and they’re going to go in and take out some of this lymph node, and they’re going to see what it is.’”

In Moreau’s telling, they took five samples in a procedure that was supposed to be relatively pain free.

“Which was a lie,” Moreau deadpanned. “… Now I’m going home and I have cancer and my shoulder hurts, so I’m really in the dumps.”

***

It’s strange. Moreau was home, but he did not have a home. He was surrounded by loved ones who were there to support him, but the diagnosis put his playing career on hold. Since he was a free agent, he did not have the power and resources of an NFL organization at his back.

Those first few days after the diagnosis were especially difficult. He longed for a team-issued iPad loaded with film to keep his mind busy, but had to settle for a chess app he downloaded on his phone. Not even March Madness could prevent him from following his thoughts down an existential hole.

“You’re just sitting there for three, four, five days until the biopsy comes back, and you’re like, what is my future? I couldn’t tell you,” Moreau said. “My damn shoulder was hurting, so I’m just sitting there on the couch like, oh my gosh, sad-boy hours.”

Tricia had challenges of her own. The day before, her son was a healthy 25-year-old, seeking out an employer to pay him millions to play football. She was, admittedly, in denial when she received the news. If there was a 90% chance Moreau had cancer, she was praying he’d fall in that rare 10%.

“This has got to be an inflammation from a cold, you know?” she said.

Still, there was an element of serendipity to this. The screening happened in New Orleans at the hospital where she was born. What the doctors found had eluded others during his physical in Cincinnati and during the regular checkups he’d received while playing for the Raiders.

If Moreau was going to have to deal with this, at least he’d have his family at his side. He was not alone while dealing with the consistent, nagging negative thoughts in his subconscious.

Still, the only real information he had pointed to cancer. He was an athlete who felt he’d lost control of his body, and he felt helpless because of it.

“When you have time to think about it and you’re just sitting around, you can be within yourself and be sad,” Tricia said. “When you’re moving and active and you have other people to keep you busy, I think it helps out a lot.”

So, Moreau got busy and he continued to live his life, just with this new, weird addition.

While he wanted to keep this information close to the vest, he let the other interested teams know what Amoss discovered in the physical. He started regularly playing pickleball with his mom at the Gernon Brown Rec Center in City Park.

And, shortly after he learned he definitely had real-deal cancer, he got on a plane and went to a wedding.

“I know,” Moreau said. “I had to do it. I’m not going to skip a wedding.”

***

Among the few downsides of being a professional athlete is the lack of privacy. Moreau knew he was running out of time before his name was splashed across ESPN alongside the word cancer, and he knew he would have to get in front of it.

And it was definitely cancer. The samples from Touro radiology went to an oncologist, Dr. Carter Davis, at Ochsner, and he told Moreau he had Hodgkin’s Lymphoma, they just could not yet be sure what type. The likeliest answer was a type of Lymphocyte-predominant Hodgkin’s Lymphoma, but they’d have to send the samples away to be sure.

About that time, Moreau decided he was still going to attend his former Raiders teammate A.J. Cole’s wedding. He just had to get a bit of an awkward phone call out of the way first.

“I wanted to let them know that everything was going on,” Moreau said. “They were getting married in like eight days and I was coming to their wedding, and I don’t know, I didn’t want in some weird and twisted way for them to think I was trying to make this about me.

“… I was like, hey, I want you guys to know I’m coming to support you guys and be happy with you guys. I’m going to get s**t-faced with you guys and we’re going to have a blast. Unfortunately, I have cancer and I’m going to have to tweet it out in the next two days.”

He went. He let people in on his secret, that he had cancer and he did not yet fully know what he was in for. He spoke with another guest at the wedding whose brother had Hodgkin’s Lymphoma, and he peppered him with questions about chemotherapy.

“It’s starting to weigh on me now,” Moreau said “It’s about to be real. It’s about to be really real. And that sucks. I’m just kind of counting my days. Then I get a call from my oncologist.”

Back in New Orleans, the results were in.

“‘It’s a more rare form — it’s Nodular Lymphocyte-predominant,’” Moreau recalled hearing from his doctor. “And I’m like, ‘Oh, rare cancer. Cool. That’s great. Perfect.’ He goes, ‘It actually might work out for you. You might have limited chemo if not any at all. … You might not miss anything. You might not miss a game.’”

Here, Moreau smiled, “This is electric.”

He started writing down notes, “misspelling every medical term, just trying to get all the information just so I could start relaying stuff,” he said.

The more he learned, the more excited he got. Nodular Lymphocyte-Predominant Hodgkin’s Lymphoma (NLPHL) is a highly treatable form of the disease. In Moreau’s case, that meant four sessions receiving doses of Rituximab, a monoclonal antibody, and no chemotherapy.

“That’s all I needed,” Moreau said. “I went out, I’m going for a run — ah, my shoulder still hurts! It’s like, oh, let’s get it! This is awesome! This is unbelievable.”

The first treatment session had him attached to an IV drip for nine hours. The subsequent ones were much shorter and easier, requiring a shot to the subcutaneous fat in his abdomen.

A day after his fourth and final session, he signed with the Saints.

***

Dramatic probably isn’t the right word to describe the change in Moreau’s outlook on life. He’s not literally stopping to smell flowers or anything like that. But he is a different person now than he was March 17, before nonsense-sounding things like NLPHL or Rituximab had any meaning for him.

Moreau cited a 2005 study from the National Science Foundation that posited that, of the tens of thousands of thoughts the average human being has in a day, 80% are negative. It’s subtle, but he notices himself feeling gratitude now where he once experienced negative emotions.

“But it’s not just gratitude; it’s making the most of the time you have and doing meaningful things that help move the needle in the way you want to be, not being the selfish little clod that complains when the world doesn’t devote itself to making you happy,” Moreau said.

So Moreau is sharing his story, unpleasant though it was, because he knows people will listen because of who he is, and because he is living proof of the value of a doctor getting their hands on you and taking a peek under the hood.

“That’s the best way to fight cancer is to find out early that you have it,” Moreau said. “That’s the most effective way. That’s the entire mission statement. That’s the whole code.

“It’s like trying to block a great pass rusher — I don’t know if you can stop him, but you can sure as s**t slow him down. Get on him early, get on him often and fight your ass off.”