Amid heartbreak, a love story
Stage IV cancer doesn’t stop college volleyball assistant coaches from getting married
The grass was being mowed and the party tent was set up. Everything was quickly coming together for the best day of Molly Gerwig’s life.
Just two days before her wedding, Gerwig sat on a hilltop that overlooks her family’s 100-acre tract in northeastern Arkansas. It’s not uncommon for cell phone service to be spotty in the area. On this day, her phone suddenly rang.
“We want you to come back and do more tests,” Dr. Yuval Raizen, an oncologist at Oncology Consultants, told Gerwig. “All we know right now is it’s cancer, and it’s malignant.”
“Malignant was the only word I heard,” said Molly, the assistant volleyball coach and recruiting coordinator at Houston Baptist.
Molly had tears in her eyes as she walked across the yard, where family and friends were busy putting final touches for the big day. Her mother and father were mowing the yard. Her fiancée Brian, the assistant volleyball coach and recruiting coordinator at the University of Houston, was putting up lights in the party tent. “He could automatically see it in my face that something was not right,” Molly said.
She broke the news to Brian and her parents. Then the couple sat and cried for 30 minutes.
“I’m sitting there thinking this is awful, I’m going to die,” Molly said.
Brian and Molly were married May 15. The honeymoon to Lake Tahoe and Yosemite National Park was postponed. Within days, the couple was back in Houston.
A second biopsy and colonoscopy diagnosed Molly with stage IV neuroendocrine colon cancer. Molly’s particular case is rare because of the location and aggressiveness. Surgery to remove the tumor was not an option.
In the span of two months, Molly went from seemingly healthy 26-yearold — a former volleyball star at Division II Harding University — to beginning emergency chemotherapy on Memorial Day weekend.
“It’s a lot when they say that you need to come back to Houston, and we don’t really know what it is, but it’s cancer and we know it’s dangerous,” Brian said. “When doctors are interested in you that’s not the best thing. Doctors had taken a sincere interest in her not only because of her age but where the cancer is, because that’s abnormal and that it’s very rare and malignant.
“We still had lots of questions.”
Heading into the final few matches of the season — moved from the fall to the spring because of the coronavirus pandemic — Molly said she noticed “some weird changes” in her bowel movements in midMarch. She made a trip to an urgent care facility, which said the likely culprit was irritable bowel syndrome and suggested a diet change and to schedule an appointment with a gastroenterologist. Still no improvement.
“It wasn’t anything like if you Google what does cancer look like,” Molly said. “I was really confused.”
Molly had braced for the worst after undergoing a biopsy of a mass in her sigmoid colon before leaving for the wedding. During the procedure, she recalled lying on the table and looking up at the monitor.
“I saw it,” Molly said. “I kind of already had it (in) my head that’s not normal. The look — it was scary.”
The current plan is for Molly to undergo four rounds of chemotherapy, after which doctors will reassess her condition in August.
“This is so rare there’s not this game plan or this treatment,” she said. “I’ll go through four rounds and take another scan and hopefully this sucker is gone. If not, we’ll keep going.”
Molly said she believes fate led her to take a job in Houston, where she lives less than 10 minutes from the renowned Texas Medical Center.
The couple’s meeting almost never happened. Brian, then an assistant coach at Arkansas State, had just returned home after the team was eliminated from a postseason tournament in 2018. The next day, at the urging of a friend, Brian attended a co-ed volleyball tournament about a threehour drive from Jonesboro, Ark.
“I met her that day,” Brian said.
Shortly after, Brian accepted a job to join his boss, David Rehr, at UH. Molly, meanwhile, accepted a job at Tarleton State in Stephenville. They continued a longdistance relationship for several months until Molly took a job at HBU in 2020.
Throughout the process, Molly and Brian have been able to take off the necessary time from work or recruit remotely during the pandemic. They are thankful for the support given by two schools and head coaches, Rehr at UH and Trent Herman at HBU.
Rehr has setup a GoFundMe that has raised $52,000. A benefit volleyball tournament will be held at 4 p.m. Saturday at Third Coast Volleyball Club.
As the wedding approached, the couple said only a few people knew of Molly’s diagnosis.
“We wanted to save our day because we get married once in our whole lives,” Brian said. “We don’t want this one day to taint everybody’s thoughts. We didn’t want pity from everyone. We wanted them to be happy and celebrate us and not be brought down.”
Molly described the day as “perfect.” The location — about 45 minutes from Memphis, Tenn. — was where Molly grew up and had special meaning. The weather was a perfect 72 degrees with “no bugs out and a beautiful sunset.” Guests ate BBQ with baked beans, potato salad and all the fixings.
Most importantly, Molly went the entire day symptom-free.
“I wasn’t flushed or tired or nauseous or any of the other miserable symptoms,” she said. “I was just overwhelmed with all the love. It was a perfect day. It was still the happiest day of my life even though we both knew what was going on.”
Then came the “in sickness and health” part of the vows.
“We both squeezed each other’s hands at the altar,” Brian said. “That was the only time during the day that I even thought about it. We were honestly living in the moment that day.”
A week later, a tree — split by a lightning strike five years earlier — close to where the wedding took place fell. Brian’s brother, who served as his best man, injured his back.
“God knew that he could at least bless us with a perfect wedding as we are walking through this storm,” Brian said.