CLEVELAND, Ohio -- Tom Seipel got the video on his phone on Dec. 23, his daughter’s sixth birthday. Right there in front of him was the quarterback of his favorite team, wearing a black knit hat with Cleveland Browns stitched into the front.
“Hey, Tom, Baker Mayfield here. Was just reading up on your story. You’re extremely inspirational, man, you’re a warrior. Just want to say, keep fighting, appreciate your support and we’ll see what happens when we get into the playoffs. We’ll see if we can make those dreams come true, bud. We’ll be praying for you man, hang in there. Go Browns.”
The video came from a random number in the Columbus area code, a number, it turned out, belonging to Rawley Davis, who learned about Seipel’s story a few days earlier.
While Mayfield and the Browns were heating up in early December, Seipel had received devastating news from his doctor.
“It’s moving really fast,” his doctor told him. “You probably only have a couple weeks left.”
On Dec. 21, Seipel went on the Browns’ subReddit and posted a picture of himself with the caption, “Hey guys! I just wanted to say thanks for all of the fun memories, I’ll keep rooting with Eric Turner and Otto Graham.”
Seipel has been battling kidney cancer since 2017. He is currently in hospice at his parents’ home in Savannah, Georgia.
“I’ve actually felt a lot better,” Seipel said in a phone interview with cleveland.com on Saturday, “but who knows if that’s my pain meds and my nausea meds all finding the right dosage? Who knows if it’s the cancer stuff working, morphine, who knows? I probably won’t know until another few weeks when I can get another scan. If I’m still around.”
Feeling better, for whatever reason, has allowed him to make a trip to Cleveland this weekend he could have never envisioned even a week ago. He’ll be at FirstEnergy Stadium, in a suite provided by Emily Mayfield, when the Browns host the Steelers in a win-and-in game for their first playoff berth since 2002.
Seipel, a man of faith, knows the reality he’s facing. He also knows what can happen when a community of Browns fans come together to help each other.
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(Photo courtesy of Tom Seipel)
Seipel is, in many ways, the quintessential Browns fan. He grew up in Columbus, but the Browns were his team since the day he was born in 1981. As do most fans of a certain age, he knows the heartbreaks of The Drive and The Fumble. Like most, he’s had mostly those heartbreaks to hang onto outside of a good year here or there.
Seipel attended Ohio State and began working at a church in Columbus. He eventually wound up spending a year in Korea teaching kindergartners English in order to overcome being an introvert and his unease of speaking in front of people.
When he got back from Korea, he made the move to Murray, Kentucky. It was there he found his true calling -- not in Kentucky, but in Nicaragua.
While working at a church in Murray, a new pastor of another church came to town and told him about a mission trip to Managua and a spot just opened up. Seipel went, thinking, if nothing else, he might get a feel for it and take his own group there the next year.
Seipel ended up drawn to the missionaries there, spending 24 hours a day, seven days a week with them. He watched kids dig through the trash to find chicken bones with meat still on them. He learned about the type of poverty and abuse many children were enduring. People were living in 10x10 shacks in a garbage dump, sleeping eight to a twin bed. Parents would ask the missionaries to take their kids to live in what were essentially two foster homes.
The missionaries told him if he was interested, they could use someone to run their boys and girls rescue homes. Seipel realized there were plenty of people who could do what he was doing in the United States. There weren’t enough in Nicaragua.
He spent the next year selling everything he had -- his house and his car -- and raising the money. He made the move full-time to Managua in 2010. He started in a boys rescue home where no one spoke English. Seipel had forgotten most of the Spanish he learned in college but a few months of total immersion with the couple who ran the home and the seven boys living there, all between the ages of five and 11, was enough to make him fluent.
He would drive the kids to school in his minivan and help out at the girls rescue, doing the same.
“I worked with these two homes and worked with these kids and loved on them because nobody else was around really to love on them anymore,” he said.
Eventually, he started his own program where he would get the kids to school in the morning, feed them lunch and then tutor them. Much of what he did was an effort to keep the kids out of dangerous situations at home. He took on the role of teaching at an English-speaking missionary school, too, during the day, when the kids he was feeding and tutoring were also at school.
Tom Seipel with his daughter, Mia, and his wife, Margarita. (Photo courtesy of Tom Seipel)
Nicaragua was where he met his wife, Margarita. Her sister was a psychologist at the girls home and she brought Margarita to a child’s birthday party almost a year after Seipel arrived. Margarita was happy to see someone having so much fun with the kids.
He got a Facebook friend request from her and eventually the two started conversing on Facebook, she translating his messages to Spanish and Seipel translating hers to English. He’s since admitted he initially viewed their online conversations as a great way to practice his Spanish.
He asked her to lunch, but she canceled and rescheduled it to a dinner date. The two sat at a Pizza Hut and spent three hours talking.
“It was that night, I realized my Spanish is a lot better than I thought,” Seipel said.
The two were married in 2013. Mia Isabella was born in 2014.
All told, he was in Nicaragua for about nine years before cancer finally forced him and his family leave.
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Seipel knew something was wrong when he went to the restroom one day at the missionary school in November of 2017.
“I went to the bathroom and I was peeing straight blood,” he said.
He went to the doctor in Nicaragua and they tried telling him it was a kidney stone. He knew it was worse. He went to a private clinic and an ultrasound revealed a tumor the size of a softball in his left kidney. They removed the tumor. It was cancerous.
In early 2018, he came back to the U.S. and the Cleveland Clinic, where he was told bluntly that kidney cancer is one of the five cancers you don’t want. It can be slowed, but eventually it’s going to kill you. Scans showed spots in his glands at the time, but everything else seemed clear until he came back from Nicaragua six months later and a scan showed spread to his lungs.
Seipel had family in Savannah, so his doctor told him to get treated there. He would oversee it, but a local oncologist would handle the treatment. This began a stretch where Seipel would fly every month from Nicaragua to Savannah. It was about a four-hour flight each way -- two hours to Miami and then two hours to Georgia. He would fly in Thursday night, do treatments on Friday, hang out with his parents on Saturday and go home on Sundays, returning to the classroom on Monday.
They would find treatments that would work for six months, but no longer. Then another, but only for another half year. Then one that wouldn’t work at all. A scan in September 2019 showed a jump from three or four spots on his lung to more than 20.
“You need to come back to the U.S.,” they told him. “You’re going to have to close everything down and sell everything in Nicaragua because you won’t be going back.”
In October 2019, Seipel and his small family said goodbye to the country they called home.
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“It was crazy how fast I went downhill,” Seipel said of his initial time in home hospice. Two or three days in, he was laying on his back 12 hours a day, vomiting, unable to move, in a lot of pain.
Out of it, sick all the time, getting pumped full of medicines to manage his pain but then getting nauseous from the medicines. One of the treatments that didn’t make him nauseous almost made him blind as a side effect.
He has since adjusted, taking his medicine at night to get it in his system, which helped with the nausea and his pain has gone down, except when he coughs, which he says is a 10 out of 10 on the pain scale.
It felt like two weeks ago this trip to Cleveland wouldn’t have been possible, whether it was an inability to physically make the trip or because his time would simply run out. He told a friend he dreamt of going to a playoff game, but now he wasn’t sure if he would even be around long enough to watch the Steelers game.
But, for four days now, he hasn’t gotten sick for the first time since early December. His dad, Tom Sr., is on this trip with his son and he can’t believe Seipel managed to sit upright on a plane for the flight to Cleveland and sat up with him and ate Rascal House Pizza.
How this all happened -- Seipel getting to the Browns’ most important game since 2002, fleeing hospice for a weekend to watch his team play in person with his dad in a suite provided by Emily Mayfield -- is kind of a whirlwind.
Davis saw Seipel’s Reddit post and started stalking Seipel on social media. He found his YouTube channel documenting his battle with cancer. Davis eventually got an email to Emily. She showed Baker. Baker sent the video.
Seipel thought the last game he would ever attend was in 2018. It was against the Chiefs, a loss, but it didn’t matter. After that season, he was all-in on Mayfield, buying jerseys and hats. He loved Mayfield’s swagger.
“Support him like crazy,” he said.
So it blew him away to get the video from Mayfield out of nowhere, especially when he realized it wasn’t one of those cameo videos. It was the real deal.
Brian Szabo, who runs an apparel company, heard about Seipel’s story through Davis. On New Year’s Day, when Davis was skiing in Wisconsin, he got a text from Szabo. “Dude, I got these four tickets. We got to do something.”
Davis reached out to Seipel on Friday at 3 p.m. asking how he felt. He said he and Szabo wanted to get him up to the game.
“For Sunday’s game?” Seipel responded. “Darn, not enough time.” There was a hospice nurse coming. He was supposed to be watching his daughter while Margarita worked. Plus, the weather was going to be rainy and cold.
His dad wouldn’t hear talk of him turning the opportunity down.
“This might be your last chance,” he said. “You’ve got to think about that.”
Seipel did think about it and realized it was something he had to do.
“If I’m going to die freezing my butt off at FirstEnergy Stadium,” Seipel said, “what a way to go out.”
Within half an hour he told Davis he was in as long as his dad could go.
Szabo booked the plane tickets as soon as he got the go-ahead and a hotel room for Seipel and his dad, Tom Sr. Davis set up a GoFundMe to cover the costs of the trip and intends for any additional proceeds to go to cover Seipel’s medical expenses.
Seipel and his dad flew in to Cleveland on Saturday. Szabo picked them up.
Tom Seipel (center) arrived in Cleveland on Saturday to attend Sunday's Browns-Steelers game. Brian Szabo (left) helped organize the trip for Seipel and his dad, Tom Sr. (right). (Photo courtesy of Brian Szabo)
One of their biggest concerns -- Seipel sitting in the cold weather at FirstEnergy Stadium, was alleviated when Emily stepped up to the plate again. She offered up her suite.
“You don’t understand how much she kept in touch,” Seipel said. “She would literally send me a message every night, ‘How are you feeling today? You haven’t sent me your blog yet.” (Seipel was doing a daily hospice blog.) He mentioned to her he was a little concerned about the cold and rain after plans were made for him to go to the game.
“I can just get you up to the suite,” she told him.
So Seipel, his dad, Davis, Szabo and a few others will be there. Seipel’s friend, Phil, will be there, who, in a small world moment, also knows Davis from when Davis grew up in the first church Seipel worked at near Columbus.
Seipel, passionate about his faith, hopes he can continue to be an example to the people who are there with him and the people who hear his story. On a personal level, he knows this could be his last-ditch party, even as someone who doesn’t party or drink.
“Just to get the band back together, me and Phil and my dad, (Phil’s) dad. They’re memories. If I’m gone two weeks from now or a month from now or who knows, at least my dad and my family, my mom, what a cool story.”
It’s a sense of closure a lot of people might not get.
“If there was a good stopping point to the end of the book,” Seipel said, “after this game would be a good point.” After all, it’s one of the best seasons he’s ever seen as a Browns fan.
Not long after his initial Reddit post, Seipel went back and commented:
“Best season I’ve seen since the mid ’80s. I always wanted a Super Bowl before I died. Hope you guys get to see one. I’ll be rooting from up above. And if you ever see a wind gust blow a FG wide. Know it was me! Love the Browns. And love you all.”
Cleveland.com reporter Hayden Grove contributed to this story.
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To donate to the GoFundMe set up for Seipel’s trip, go here.
To donate to his family support fund, go here.
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New Browns face masks for sale: Here’s where you can buy Cleveland Browns-themed face coverings for coronavirus protection for adults and youth, including a single mask ($14.99) and a 3-pack ($24.99). All NFL proceeds donated to CDC Foundation.
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