Giants coordinator takes up fight against disease

Giants coordinator takes up fight against disease
Saturday, November 28, 2009
BY JEFF ROBERTS
The Record
STAFF WRITER

There was nothing they could do but pray.

Laurie Cavanaugh slowly wasted away, poisoned by her own body. Hope began to fade as her search for a private kidney donor dragged on, each rejected candidate bringing her closer to dialysis and the years-long wait on an organ transplant list.

Cavanaugh was yet another member of Giants offensive coordinator Kevin Gilbride’s family forced to battle polycystic kidney disease.

“Nobody could give her one. So this went on and on,” Gilbride said of his younger sister. “Of course my son and my daughters volunteered. My nieces and nephews volunteered. None of them were suitable matches.

“It was a one-in-a-million shot.”

Then their prayers were answered — by a football coach. Cavanaugh received a kidney from Oregon State offensive coordinator Danny Langsdorf in 2007, becoming the second of three Gilbride kids whose transplants have transformed a legacy of tragedy into a legacy of survival.

Coaching runs in the Gilbride genes just like PKD, with Gilbride; his son, Kevin (Temple football); and Gilbride’s brother, Tim (Bowdoin basketball); following in the footsteps of Kevin’s father, Bernard “Bucky” Gilbride.

But even on a Thanksgiving night this Giants coach may want to forget, as his team lost to the Denver Broncos, 26-6, you can be sure the Gilbride clan once again gave thanks not just for what happens on a football field, but for life after all the pain and loss caused by this disease.

PKD is a life-threatening disorder in which clusters of cysts develop primarily in the kidneys, the organs that filter waste from the blood. The cysts slowly reduce kidney function, causing complications before shutting them down.

PKD is largely unknown despite being one of the world’s most common life-threatening genetic diseases, affecting more than 500,000 nationally and 12.5 million worldwide, according to the PKD Foundation.

There is no treatment. And there is no cure.

Gilbride’s father, grandmother and aunt died of it. Three of his siblings, three cousins and an uncle needed kidney transplants.
Gilbride, 58, and his three children do not have the disease.

When he is not calling plays for the Giants, he’s a goodwill ambassador for the PKD Foundation, testifying in front of Congress and raising awareness and money to fight the disease.

“When I take the time to reflect on it, I realize how rampant it is in my family and how profoundly it has affected our family,” Gilbride said, “both with the losses of so many people who were so influential and so loved and then about the anxiety that we’ve gone through with my cousins and my brothers and sisters.

“Now there are nieces and nephews who have it and there’s still no cure for it.”

The memory of Kevin’s father, his hero, drives him. His dad — who died at age 45 in 1972 — was a role model, a “nutty tough” football and basketball coach and teacher.

Gilbride watched the impurities slowly build up in the World War II veteran’s blood, weakening a larger-than-life man. Bucky Gilbride coached to the end, breaking several bones just months before he died while showing his basketball team how to take a charge.

Gilbride’s eyes reddened, but the smile never left his face as he talked about his father and then his late mother, Marie, who raised seven children alone after Bucky died.

Gilbride, a Bergen County resident, uses his two decades in the NFL, including his tenure as the head coach of the San Diego Chargers (1997-98) and the Giants’ 2008 Super Bowl championship, as a way of spreading awareness.

The work is hard, especially hearing stories that sound achingly similar to those of his family.

“That was one of the things that was so upsetting when I was on the [PKD Foundation’s] board of trustees. You hear the numbers,” he said from his office. “There’s so many people desperate for a kidney, and they can’t get one.

“And there’s some horror stories that by the time they find the match or they’re willing to do it, sometimes their condition has deteriorated to such a point where they won’t waste it on them. It’s horrible.”

But the disease has provided the Gilbrides with one gift — Kevin’s life.

He bought life insurance in 1992 when he was the Houston Oilers’ offensive coordinator — from an offensive lineman, Doug Dawson. Gilbride was required to take a battery of tests because of the family history. The last one, an ultrasound — which he had put off for months — discovered he had kidney cancer.

Doctors had to remove one of his kidneys.

“Of course my brothers and sisters used to tease me,” said Gilbride. “They said, ‘It’s so typical. You’d rather give it up to cancer than give it to one of us.’

“If our family had not had the polycystic kidneys and had I not gone for the test, I probably wouldn’t have discovered that I had renal cell carcinoma until it was too late.”

But there are too many people like his dad who have died, and too many people like three of his siblings, who have suffered because of PKD.

Cavanaugh’s kidney function had plummeted to just 10 percent the day of her surgery, and her kidneys — which should have combined to weigh about a pound — had each grown to 10 pounds.

“By the time Danny found he was a match, I was beginning to think I wasn’t going to get one and I was going to have to go on dialysis,” said Cavanaugh, whose husband, Mike, is Oregon State’s offensive line coach. “For me that was the hardest thing, not knowing if I was going to get a donor. It’s an emotional roller coaster.”

Matt Gilbride, the youngest of Kevin’s siblings, was the first among them to need a transplant.

“It’s a very gradual, physical change in your body. You almost don’t realize how sick you’re getting,” said the Connecticut attorney, who received a kidney from his sister, Kathy Haines, in 2006.

That’s why spreading awareness is so imperative to Gilbride.

“People don’t even know about it. Sickle cell anemia. Muscular dystrophy. Hemophilia. Combine them all and they’re still not as common as this,” said Gilbride. “But you ask anybody and they know those diseases. No one ever heard of this one.”

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