DAVID AND ERIC SHAW

David and Eric Shaw are brothers.

Blood brothers.

To the nth degree.

But never mind.

And never mind that blood brothers — back in the day — pricked a finger, drew blood, rubbed a dab of blood on the other’s finger…and then, were certifiably considered to be “blood brothers.”

This is not that.

This is very different.

A stem cell transfusion, when all other options have been exhausted, is another story altogether.

Mycosis fungoides, a type of T-cell lymphoma which affects one in six million — 1 in 6 million — people in the United States and Europe — certainly a rare form of skin cancer — was eating Eric Shaw alive.

Literally.

He was 38.

In 2013, he and his wife Crystal were able to secure a referral to Stanford Cancer Center where leading experts in the disease were on staff.

Mycosis fungoides accounts for only 4% of all non-Hodgkin lymphoma cases.

Among those who are afflicted, 20% presented the level of itching which Eric experienced.

Rarer still, to be diagnosed under the age of 40.

Not so rare?

African-American men often end up with the worst prognosis.

Eric Shaw was dying, a rare, aggressive skin cancer tearing through his body with such ferocity and singleness of purpose that he — and his doctors — were running out of options.

His skin darkened, scars deepened and his features became dramatically altered.

Eric didn’t look like Eric anymore.

Strange looking spots started to appear on his torso, continuing to present until they covered his whole body.

Eventually, tumors began to grow; it looked as if marbles had been pushed under his skin.

And the itching was unbearable.

He needed sleep medication in order to get some uninterrupted rest.

Even then, he itched subconsciously and scratched in his sleep only to wake up to blood-soaked sheets.

At one point, Eric had no fewer than thirty open wounds on his body.

Then there was the accompanying mental thing.

Recalled Eric, “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. 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 were flummoxed.

They had a difficult time diagnosing the disease, as it is often confused with psoriasis, eczema and other skin conditions.

Finally, the determination was made that Eric had mycosis fungoides.

Radiation failed.

Chemo failed.

Two bone marrow transplants failed.

David Shaw looks at his younger brother, tubes snaking across his arms, machines beeping and whirring and begins to reminisce with Eric about their childhood, when the two were inseparable.

Almost like twins.

They rode bikes together, played video games and engaged in spirited one-on-one hoop contests, which quickly became epic.

“I was always kind of a little bit stronger and I’ll never forget the last time we played one-on-one basketball,” David recalled.

“He just got better than me, and he won, and once I got over the anger and disappointment, I was proud because my younger brother had grown and was gaining confidence.”

Spoken like a true big brother.

Remembered Eric, “I wanted nothing more than to beat him, and he wanted nothing more than to keep beating me. But, during those times, it was just us, it was me and him. He was my best friend.”

Spoken like a true little brother.

David Shaw enters Eric’s hospital room nearly every day around lunchtime and takes a seat right next to the bed.

“What do you say, where you think you’ve pulled at the last thread and there are no more threads?” he wondered aloud, rhetorically.

“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.”

David Shaw is relied upon to always know what to say, how to say it, and when to deliver the message.

David Shaw is the head football coach at Stanford University.

When the Cardinal opened its Pac-12 season at Oregon last Saturday (November 7) David and Eric were sure to be thinking about all of it, because the last time Stanford traveled to Eugene, neither one knew whether Eric would live or die.

They know now.

Seven years after this hellish nightmare began.

And after Stanford came from behind to win an exciting game in overtime 38–31, David looked directly into the camera at the close of his post-game interview and said, “To my brother Eric: I love you.”

He tapped the lime-green lymphoma awareness pin affixed to his black Stanford sweatshirt and turned to jog toward the tunnel leading to the locker room.

“If that transplant [the second bone marrow transplant] didn’t work, I didn’t know how many more games he was going to be able to see,” David explained.

“That was an opportunity for me on national TV to be able to speak to him, to say to my brother that against the odds, we came back and throughout the entire game, I was thinking about him.”

After the second failed bone marrow transplant, there was no plan.

There were no other donor options.

This was not good enough for David Shaw.

Not even close.

Nor was it going to be good enough for Eric’s team of doctors.

They hatched a plan which was questioned by many of their colleagues, simply because it had never before been considered.

In mid-October of 2018, they told Eric they wanted to attempt a third transplant.

This time they wanted David to be the donor and time was of the essence.

Rejected as a donor to Eric before because he was not a viable candidate — on a 10-point match scale, David had registered a 5, rendering him ‘unqualified’ — this would be risky, but after 25 years of research, different ways to perform half-match transplants, known as haploidentical transplants, had been discovered and offered potential.

A glimmer of hope.

Typically in these transplants, donor cells from family members are used.

No one had ever done a third transplant with donor cells at Stanford.

“If he didn’t go for this risk, he wouldn’t be here,” said Dr. Youn Kim, who treated Eric and heads Stanford’s multidisciplinary Cutaneous Lymphoma Clinic/Program.

“He wouldn’t be living.”

Doctors advised Shaw that there was a 15% chance that he wouldn’t survive the transplant itself.

If he did survive it, the chance that the donor cells would take — and work — was estimated at 30–40%.

Compared to much steeper survival odds with no transplant performed, the decision — enshrouded in multiple layers of danger — all of a sudden, didn’t feel so risky.

They had to try.

David Shaw remembered it this way:

“They might have told us what the odds were, and I honestly just pushed it out of my brain.

If this is the Hail Mary, hey, we’re going to drop back and throw it as far as we can and send prayers along with it and hope that it works.”

Without hesitation, David said to Eric, “Tell me what I need to do.”

What he did was to endure an unusual bone marrow transplant procedure.

Instead of stem cells being extracted from his hips, he was given medication that stimulated his body to overproduce the cells needed for the transplant, flooding his blood with them.

The cells would then be extracted from his blood and transplanted into Eric.

Knowing full well that he could expect joint pain and fatigue within 24 hours — symptoms which would worsen over the days ahead, before he would return for more medication — was of no moment to David Shaw.

Advised to stay off his feet, rest and remain hydrated, he did what he had to do.

He had a game to coach that late-afternoon.

“The way I do my job, I work really hard not to make it about me. Although I wanted my team to know what my family was going through, college football is about the student-athletes. I wanted them to focus on what they needed to do. I didn’t want to pull from that. I didn’t want to, all of a sudden, now make it about me and my family.”

— David Shaw

By mid-week he was back in the hospital for the final procedure. He was hooked up to a machine that would do the work through two IVs: one took his blood so the needed donor cells could be siphoned out, and the other replaced the blood in his body that had been taken.

The next day, November 1, 2018, David Shaw returned to the hospital with Eric’s wife Crystal.

It was transplant day.

Though it was touch-and-go for awhile — Eric had a dangerously high fever of 105 degrees, experienced intense pain which demanded a morphine drip, vomited for days and dropped in and out of consciousness — a few weeks later he started to turn the corner.

Though it was unclear whether the transplant had taken just then, Eric showed enough improvement to be discharged from the hospital, after 52 days.

The doctors had extracted 28 million cells from David’s blood, about 20 million more than they had hoped to get.

Three days after his homecoming, the results were in.

After only 27 days, Eric had none of his own blood coursing through his body.

It was all his brother David’s.

The transplant — #3 — had been a success.

Blood brothers.

For life.

Eric Shaw is now 46 and was declared cancer free on January 1, 2019.

What happened was a miracle, plain and simple.

He is cancer free today.

David Shaw’s cells are in Eric Shaw’s body, keeping the lymphoma away, and the chances the cancer returns is thought to be less than 1%.

His doctors have told Eric that he is no longer a cancer patient.

“…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.”

— Eric Shaw

[Editor’s Note: This piece was written by Mr. Kaplan in November 2020.]