NFL Pro's First Priority? His Daughter, Who Is Fighting Cancer
Photo by Devon Still/Instagram
"My outlook on life will always be labeled as BC (before cancer) AC (after cancer)," NFL pro Devon Still tweeted Tuesday night in a heartbreaking update on his mission to help his daughter Leah, 4, survive her battle with cancer. “Leah and all the kids I’ve met changed my life completely.”
The shifting of priorities began a mere five months ago for the 25-year-old Cincinnati Bengal’s defensive tackle. That’s when Still’s little girl was diagnosed with stage 4 neuroblastoma, a pediatric nerve-cell cancer, giving her just over a 50 percent chance of survival. It’s also when the athlete decided to put aside his football career. ”When I found out, I told my family I was done. Done,” Still, who co-parents Leah with her mom, ex-girlfriend Channing Smythe, confessed to the Cincinnati Enquirer. “I didn’t feel comfortable leaving my daughter while she’s going through this. She’s fighting for her life. Sports is not more important than me being there while my daughter is fighting for her life.”
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The team excused him from off-season activities so that he could attend to Leah at Children’s Hospital in Philadelphia (near Still’s hometown of Wilmington, Delaware), and he spent the first three weeks of her hospital stay sleeping on a cot in her room. In solidarity with his girl as she went through chemotherapy on the tumor in her abdomen, the devoted dad even went bald with her and has said he won’t let his hair grow again until his daughter’s returns.
Photo by Devon Still/Twitter
Then, after a hamstring injury sidelined the 2012 second-round draft pick in August, the Bengals cut him from the team. But coaches kept Still on their practice squad, allowing him to continue to receive health insurance for his family through the NFL but not having to travel to away games.
"I completely understand where they were coming from," he said when the news broke. “…They want guys to solely focus on football, which is understandable [but] right now I am not in a position where I can give football 100 percent of everything I have.”
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Still had been giving his all to Leah. And thankfully, the family recently got some great news. She has recovered well enough from chemotherapy and a successful six-hour surgery that she is going to Cincinnati to watch her dad on the field on Nov. 6 against the Cleveland Browns at Paul Brown Stadium, where she’ll get to see pop play football for the first time.
"It will probably be the most special game I’m ever going to play because I know my daughter is going to be here to watch," Still told the Associated Press. “It’s going to be added motivation…I want her to be able to hear how the crowd cheers that loud whenever I make a tackle, so I’m going to go out there and do whatever I can to put a smile on her face.”
The game is going to be momentous for another reason as well. Between the first and second quarters, the Bengals will present a check to Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center (CCHMC) with the proceeds they raised selling Still’s No. 75 jersey to benefit pediatric cancer care and research at the hospital — a whopping sum of $1.25 million.
"It’s amazing," CCHMC spokesman Nick Miller tells Yahoo Parenting of the gift. "Of the federal research funding allotted to cancer research, roughly four cents of every dollar goes to pediatric cancers. The rest goes to adult cancers. So this will have a tremendous impact."
Still has had enormous impact, as well. In addition to raising $52,000 so far, on his own, to benefit CCHMC and Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, the athlete has had a huge hand in raising awareness of childhood cancer.
"Devon is an individual with a lot on his plate already, and a very sick little girl, yet this man finds the ability to come to our medical center and spend a day visiting with other kids to bolster their spirits, ” says Miller. “He’s really rallied the community.”
Still says he simply wants to turn some negatives into positives. “Seeing what families have to go through, and that they’re in the same position I’m in but can’t afford [care] makes me want to bring more awareness, more research to this, so nobody else has to go through it,” he told the Enquirer.
The real hero here, he insists, is little Leah. “I can honestly say I truly look up to my daughter now,” Still explains on his "Help the Bengals Sack Pediatric Cancer" fundraising website. “In the four years of life she has had, she has been through way more than I have in 24. Her courage, strength, and high spirits through it all are nothing short of inspirational.”