The University of Oregon volleyball team’s stellar 2018 signing class included two players ranked in the top 15 nationally, and a third who has spent the last two summers with the USA Youth National Team.
Yet for all of their accolades, the biggest signing might just be the team’s smallest, a three-foot-eight eight-year-old whose uniform usually consists of a jersey, knee pads, and a medical face mask.
Eugene native Danielle Bixby has Langerhans cell histiocytosis (LCH), a disorder where immune cells known as Langerhans cells build up in the body and start attacking it instead of defending it, causing tumors and inflamed tissue in the bones that makes bones painful and more prone to fracturing.
The first sign that something was wrong was at Thanksgiving in 2016, when Bixby developed scabs on the top of her head. Her mother, Shannon Baimbridge, initially didn’t think much of it, as Bixby also has obsessive compulsive disorder, sensory processing disorder, generalized anxiety, and Tourette’s syndrome, and often picked at her skin.
But the scabs were still there a month later, and Bixby had begun to wet her bed as well. She was drinking so much water Baimbridge had to shut the water off at home, and she arranged for her daughter to be monitored constantly at school to stop her drinking excessively and making the problem worse.
That led to a trip to see a doctor, and a barrage of tests.
“From December of 2016 to February of 2017 we did blood draws every single week,” said Baimbridge. “We did urine samples, we were testing for everything under the sun, and her pediatrician finally tested for the hormone called vasopressin, which is your antidiuretic hormone, and she was missing it. We got sent to Portland to an endocrinologist, and within three days they found she had a tumor on her pituitary gland.”
Then came an agonizing wait until August 2017 for further results to come in. Shannon suspected Danielle had LCH. An oncologist was not convinced, so Shannon took Danielle to a dermatologist to get her skin lesions biopsied. The biopsy came back positive for LCH, and six months after the tumor was discovered, so was the root cause.
“That’s when they did head-to-toe scans and they found that her jaw and her arms also had the beginning of bone lesions—it literally eats a hole right through your bones,” Baimbridge said. “A lot of patients who have bone lesions will be playing and will fall and their arm will break, and they’ll go in to the hospital for x-rays and that’s when they’ll find the LCH. For Danielle to present the way that she presented is rare. Everything about the disease is rare, and everything about the way Danielle presented is even more rare.”
Danielle underwent her first round of chemotherapy on August 18, 2017. While she was receiving treatment, Shannon contacted Team IMPACT (Inspire, Motivate, and Play Against Challenges Together), a national nonprofit that connects collegiate athletic teams with children living with chronic illnesses. Team IMPACT was already well known in the UO athletics department, after they paired the baseball team with James Dahl, a 15-year-old from Eugene with Rasmussen’s encephalitis, this past spring. Resa Lovelace, then the UO’s director of student-athlete development, asked UO head coach Matt Ulmer if the volleyball team would be interested in working with Danielle.
“That was a no-brainer for us,” said Ulmer.
On August 7, the UO volleyball team held a special signing-day ceremony at Matthew Knight Arena to announce the final member of its signing class. While flanked by Baimbridge, Ulmer, and setter August Raskie, Danielle Bixby signed her letter of intent and officially became the team’s newest—and shortest—member.
“Danielle completes our class of 2018, which was ranked number four in the country, and I believe the addition of Danielle elevates our group to number one,” Ulmer said when introducing Danielle at the signing day ceremony. “Don't let Danielle's three-foot-eight frame fool you; she is all fast-twitch, she has a big-time vertical, blazing speed, and can do the best cartwheels I've ever seen.”
“I'm thankful for having my team here and giving me hugs every time I come here, and for helping me out and for calling me their little Duck,” Bixby said.
The signing-day ceremony came after another surprise the team had lined up for Danielle: Les Groscup, senior director of arena operations at Matthew Knight Arena, had arranged for Danielle to have her own locker in the team’s locker room, which was stocked with her UO volleyball uniform—“Danielle sized,” according to Ulmer—and a bobble head of UO alumnus and Nike cofounder Phil Knight, BBA ’58.
“I felt happy, and a little scared,” said Danielle of the signing day experience. “I have a bobble head, and even though his name is Uncle Phil, I call him Uncle Bobby because he’s a bobble head. Coach Matt thinks it’s funny.”
Before matches, Danielle dresses with the team in the locker room—often wearing her hair in an identical fashion to one of the players, be it Raskie’s twin buns, Willow Johnson’s ponytail, or Lindsay Vander Weide’s loose curls—then sits with the coaching staff and helps oversee pregame warmups. She is one of the Ducks shown on the video scoreboard in the hype video played before each match, and was introduced with the starters before the “Stomp Our Cancer” match against Arizona State on September 30, at the tail end of Childhood Cancer Awareness Month. Following each match she joins the team in the autograph line and signs posters for fans—after the match against Stanford on October 21, she signed alongside her teammates for an hour.
“I think that’s secretly her favorite thing, signing autographs for the fans,” said Baimbridge. “She signs every single thing that comes through.”
Danielle’s days with the team are bright spots in a year that has proven to be incredibly trying for the family. Every five weeks, they would go to the Ronald McDonald House in Portland for Danielle’s chemotherapy treatments; lifesaving drugs were pumped into her system through a port in her chest.
“It took about an hour each time,” said Baimbridge. “On Tuesday, she would get antibiotics, Benadryl, then chemo, then ibuprofen, then we crossed our fingers she didn’t get sick. But, she always got sick or had a fever.”
Danielle stayed in school until January 2018, when Shannon and the nurse at Danielle’s elementary school determined the flu season was too bad and she needed to be withdrawn. The budding artist and dancer—she learns dance moves on YouTube, and dances with the UO team on the court before and after matches—was homeschooled the rest of the academic year, thanks to a tutor who came to the house three times a week.
Shannon quit her job to look after Danielle, and now supports the family through government assistance and the income she receives from Sew Let’s Begin, a sewing company she started; earlier this season she made dolls of each of the players, and presented them with their cloth likenesses after the “Stomp Out Cancer” match to thank them for the difference they had made in Danielle’s life.
“The team is amazing, I can’t say that enough,” Baimbridge said. “We send texts regularly. When Danielle was at chemo, we’d send pictures saying, ‘Hey, this is how she is,’ and they’d send encouraging messages back. They’re just great. I don’t think I could ask for anything else from a team. These girls really truly love Danielle. They’ve accepted our whole family, and they treat our whole family like royalty.”
The team’s support of Danielle isn’t limited to game days, either. They took her to see The Incredibles 2, took her out for ice cream—she and Willow Johnson are partial to eating strawberry ice cream together—and even threw her a surprise birthday party.
“She’s also in all of our team meetings, and she likes to speak up as part of our coaching staff,” laughed Ulmer. “I love that. I love whatever she has to say.”
During a volleyball season that has had its ups and downs—a 3-1 win against No. 1 Minnesota on one end of the spectrum, a 3-0 loss to unranked Arizona State in the “Stomp Out Cancer” match at the other—Danielle’s relentless positivity and energy have fueled the team, reminding them that life is about much more than just what happens on the court.
“She brings a lot of energy to us, and a lot of humility when we get super sucked into the game and think, ‘Oh my gosh, it’s the end of the world,’” said Raskie. “It took me too long to figure out that volleyball is just a game and to play with that kind of humility. I love volleyball, and yes it is a big deal, but at the end of the day life goes on and there are more important things happening.”
Long-term, Danielle’s prognosis is good. The LCH is not in her liver, spleen, or bone marrow, meaning her chance of survival is high. That said, she isn’t fully in the clear—there’s a better than 50-50 chance she will relapse at some point, and as it’s in her brain, she will always be at risk of developing neuro degenerative and central nervous system issues.
“She’s a fighter,” said Ulmer. “She’s got a battle ahead of her, and we’re doing what we can to help.”
The UO’s season will end in December following the NCAA Division I Women’s Volleyball Championship, but their relationship with Danielle is far from over. As far as the players are concerned, once she signed her letter of intent she was just as much a part of the team as they were, which means the saying known to UO alumni worldwide applies equally to her.
“She’s part of our team—she’s Class of 2023,” said Raskie. “However long she wants to stay, she’s part of our family. Once you’re a Duck, you’re always a Duck.”
- Damian Foley, UO Communications
Learn more:
Danielle Bixby on Facebook
Team IMPACT