Brown: Patrick McCaffery is Resilient

Iowa Junior Forward Has Overcome Adversity Throughout Young Life

Iowa's Patrick McCaffery (22) dribbles during a game against Bethune-Cookman on Nov. 7, 2022 at Carver-Hawkeye Arena in Iowa City, Iowa. (Rob Howe/HawkeyeNation.com)

IOWA CITY, Iowa - It was a day that started out like hundreds of others, a drive from Des Moines to Iowa City for a weekly news conference.

Most of those trips have faded from memory. This one didn’t.

It was March 11, 2014. Iowa’s basketball team, in the nation’s Top 10 in late January, had lost its mojo. The Hawkeyes had lost five of their last six regular-season games to fall to 20-11 heading into a first-round game with Northwestern in the Big Ten Tournament two days later in Indianapolis, Ind.

But all that became secondary after the University of Iowa’s media relations office issued a press release before Coach Fran McCaffery’s scheduled news conference. Patrick McCaffery, 13, one of Fran and Margaret’s four children, had been diagnosed with a tumor on his thyroid. Surgery was scheduled eight days later. Life quickly replaced the losing streak as the day’s storyline.

I remember Fran McCaffery, sitting at the front table of that news conference, looking exhausted I remember Margaret was there, too, like she had been the day before when her husband tried to tell his team about Patrick’s diagnosis and broke into tears. It was Margaret who shared the news as Devyn Marble hugged Fran and told him, “We got you, coach.”

I have a lasting image of Patrick that day. He came bounding down the hallway, dribbling a basketball past Iowa’s locker room as he headed out to the Carver-Hawkeye Arena floor. He was a picture of boundless energy, all 6 feet 4 inches and 140 pounds of him, a smile on his face. The innocence of youth, I thought at the time.

On March 22, three days after Patrick had surgery to remove the tumor, two days after the Hawkeyes saw their season end with an overtime loss to Tennessee in the NCAA Tournament and one day after his 14th birthday, the McCafferys learned their son’s tumor was malignant.

A second surgery followed. The cancer has stayed away, but the medical hurdles he’s had to clear to keep him on the court have been challenging.

And now this young man, a 6-9, 210-pound junior on the Hawkeye basketball team, is working through another challenge.

On Jan. 3, Patrick announced he was taking a leave of absence from the basketball team to address anxiety, which has affected his sleep, appetite and stamina. In his announcement, he said that these struggles make it “incredibly difficult to function normally.”

I, like many others, have seen first hand what anxiety can do if not addressed. It can tie a person into knots, and make the simplest task feel like mission impossible. Crawling out of that hole, once you let it consume you, is tougher than any opponent on the basketball floor.

So I applaud Patrick for addressing the issue head-on. It wasn’t an easy thing to do. Imagine, playing side-by-side with your older brother, Connor, in his last season as a Hawkeye. Imagine playing for your dad, and teammates you love and care about. And then putting all those things on the shelf for the good of your own mental health.

But Patrick McCaffery has faced more challenges than many 21-year-old college juniors. I think back to March of 2021, when Patrick was about to make his NCAA Tournament debut against Grand Canyon. I talked to his parents to get a feel for what life was like for him. It was far cry from the normal college student, seven years of following a path to adulthood that is foreign to most.

“Knowing everything he’s gone through and done, and the family has gone through and done, to get to where he’s at is pretty amazing,” Margaret said then.

The thyroid regulates metabolism, among other things, in the body. Patrick takes medicine that helps restore thyroid levels by replacing the amount of thyroxine his body is missing. Finding the right dosage hasn’t been easy.

After playing 26 minutes of the first two games his freshman season, he sat the rest of the year for “residual health issues.” Finding the right dosage continued.

Without a thyroid of his own, doctors wanted to keep Patrick hyperthyroid, which means his metabolism is running fast. That’s preferred over hypothyroidism, which leaves one sluggish and tells the body to create more thyroid hormone.

When to eat, what to eat, how much protein in the diet, how much to hydrate were all questions that had to be answered, while knowing that the conditioning and strength training required to be a high-level athlete made the puzzle even harder to solve.

“His body doesn’t reset the same way,” Margaret said in 2021. “He’s a warrior, that’s for sure. He just fights and fights.”

Patrick has done some great things on the court. He left West High School (Iowa City) as the career scoring leader. He joined Connor in helping Iowa win last season’s Big Ten Tournament Championship. When they joined their parents in a group hug, I thought about the unique trip Patrick and his family took to get there. They shared that same hug earlier this season when Fran notched his 500th career victory.

But sometimes life gets in the way. Sometimes, you’ve got to call timeout and take a break. That’s just what Patrick is doing. He vows to be back, and I hope he makes it.

I think back to something Fran McCaffery shared before that 2021 NCAA game, when he discussed the road Patrick had traveled. Those words resonate today.

“At first you just want him to be healthy and to live,” Fran said. “And then you want him to do what he loves to do.”