From a mental toll to physical challenges, how cancer has changed Commanders coach Ron Rivera’s life

ASHBURN, Va. — The biannual checkups for cancer continue to provide positive results. That doesn’t prevent Washington Commanders coach Ron Rivera from playing the what-if game before every visit.

It’s been two years since he was diagnosed with squamous cell carcinoma during his first training camp with Washington. That means it’s been only two years since he had to deliver the news to his mom, who was still coping with the death of Rivera’s brother, Mickey, to pancreatic cancer five years earlier. And only two years since undergoing seven weeks of treatment that altered Rivera’s life.

So when he goes in for a checkup, as he did in March and will do so again in September …

“I always hold my breath,” Rivera said.

“There’s always trepidation,” his wife, Stephanie, said.

Rivera once asked Dr. John Marshall, the chief of the division of hematology/oncology at Georgetown University Hospital, Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center, “When do you stop feeling this way, this fear that it’s going to come back?”

That fear accompanied him when he underwent his one-year biopsy.

“You’re on pins and needles,” Rivera said. “All of a sudden the call comes and you see that number and for that brief second you’re thinking … then when the doctor says it came up negative and everything you’re doing is great, that’s a huge relief.”

Rivera’s cancer diagnosis in August 2020 changed him. It made him appreciate the details of life and alter his schedule to do things he might not have previously. He’s become an advocate for proton therapy and befriended others going through cancer treatments, providing guidance and becoming a de facto cheerleader — as others were for him.

It also took quite a mental toll, from Rivera’s own experience as well as from losing his brother in 2015.

Rivera says he feels much better as he enters his third year with Washington — the best he has felt before a season during his coaching tenure in D.C. He was undergoing cancer treatments in Year 1; the residual…