'We're truly blood brothers': Stanford coach David Shaw and his recent fight to save his brother, Eric
David Shaw walks into the hospital room and takes a seat next to the bed. He does this nearly every day, right around lunchtime.
He looks at his younger brother, Eric, tubes snaking across his arms, machines beeping and whirring. Eric does not look like Eric anymore, his skin darkened, scars deepened, features altered. They both know this but never mention it.
They talk about movies, or random memories from their childhood when they were often inseparable, riding bikes, playing video games and challenging each other to one-on-one basketball. They avoid talking about why David comes as often as he does to visit, though they know the reason.
Eric is dying, a rare, aggressive skin cancer rampaging through his body with such ferocity that his doctors are nearly out of options. Radiation failed. Chemotherapy failed. Two bone marrow transplants failed.
As Stanford's head football coach, David Shaw is relied on to always know what to say, how to say it and when to say it; but he cannot find the words now that he and his brother are staring down what seems to be an inevitable fate.
"What do you say, where you think you've pulled at the last thread and there are no more threads?" David said. "All I could tell him was that I loved him and that I was there for him. The rest of it was really just ... I thought it was only a matter of time before he passed away."
Two years later, what happened between David and Eric remains real, present and raw -- changing their entire relationship, redefining what it means to be a brother. The words are still difficult to say, so they tip-toe around the crushing physical and mental toll Eric's cancer took on them.
David and Eric are sure to think about it all this weekend, when Stanford opens its season at Oregon on Saturday. Because the last time the Cardinal visited Eugene, neither one knew whether Eric would live or die.
After Stanford came from behind to win that game 38-31 in overtime, David delivered a message at the end of his postgame television interview, looking at the camera and saying, "To my brother Eric: I love you." He tapped the lime green pin on his black Stanford sweatshirt before he left the screen.
When Shaw became head coach at Stanford in 2011, it was the culmination of a family journey. His father was a longtime coach there; David played receiver for the Cardinal and eventually returned as an assistant under Jim Harbaugh. The entire Shaw family -- parents Willie and Gay, along with David, Eric and their sister, Tawnya -- all call the Bay Area home.
To this day, David says the day he was introduced as coach was "one of the better days in all our lives."
Yet something started to happen to Eric that no one could quite figure out. That same year, Eric found strange looking spots on his torso. His wife, Crystal, noticed the first one under his arm. Maybe it was eczema, they thought. Then the spots started to spread. He went to the doctor. They prescribed an ointment, but the spots kept popping up, until they covered his entire body. Eventually, tumors started to grow. It looked as if someone had pushed marbles under his skin. Doctors remained confounded. Eric itched uncontrollably, insatiably. His skin itched so badly, it became difficult to put on clothes, shower, sleep and go to work. He eventually needed sleep medication so he could get uninterrupted rest.
It took several years before Eric Shaw's illness was properly diagnosed as a rare form of skin cancer called mycosis fungoides. Early signs were spots all over his body, similar to psoriasis, before tumors began to form underneath his skin.
Even then, he itched subconsciously, only realizing what happened when he woke up in the morning to find his arms and sheets covered in blood. Some nights, he tried to sleep on his forearms so his body wouldn't touch the sheets, because his skin grew too sensitive to any touch. At one point, he had more than 30 open wounds on his body.
"It's something that's so pervasive and so destructive that a lot of people have mental problems -- you can't do anything without extreme pain," Eric said. "You bleed a lot through the tumors, through the lesions, through the scratching. A lot of people don't survive, really, because of the mental stress that comes with it."
Doctors had a hard time diagnosing his disease because it is often confused with psoriasis, eczema or other skin conditions. Eventually, they determined he had a rare form of skin cancer called mycosis fungoides, a type of T-cell lymphoma that affects one in 6 million people in the United States and Europe. At the time, Eric Shaw was 38.
.
.
continued
.
.
Eric and David want to share their story, in the hopes they can help cancer patients and survivors, while encouraging people to consider becoming bone marrow donors. David still wears his green pin, calling it a "badge of honor."
Still, the truly deep, meaningful conversation about the cancer, the ensuing trauma and their shared connection has escaped them, two years later. Grateful hugs often substitute for words.
"It's beyond uncomfortable," David said.
How do you ask someone you love how it felt to be at death's door?
How do you ask someone you love how it felt to save your life?
"At some point we're going to sit down, because I know that he has a lot of feelings about playing a role in saving my life," Eric said. "He's a little protected, and that's who I've always known him to be. I've hinted at what this has meant spiritually and how it's really changed me completely on the inside. I don't even know if I'm going to have the words to express how I already felt about him before all of this happened.
"But then, for God to use him to save me and impact me and impact my family, it's almost indescribable what that means to me, in terms of him being my brother who I've always looked up to. We're gonna need a lot of tissues."
Entire article:
https://www.espn.com/college-footba...ach-david-shaw-recent-fight-save-brother-eric
