Michael Strahan’s daughter Isabella has opened she’s battling a malignant brain tumour familiar as medulloblastoma.
The TV news anchor and his 19-year-old daughter uncover during an appearance on Good Morning America that Isabella is undergoing treatment for the cancerous brain tumour, which grew up in the lower back part of the brain called the cerebellum.
While talking to GMA co-anchor Robin Roberts on 11 January, Isabella said she was diagnosed with medulloblastoma in late October after she started experiencing headaches during her 1st semester as a freshman at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. “I’m feeling good, not too bad,” said Isabella. “I’m very excited for this entire process to wrap, but you just have to keep living everyday, I think, via the whole stuff.”
The college student first noticed her symptoms when she started experiencing “excruciating” headaches and nausea. She initially thought she was suffering from vertigo, but when she woke up one morning and started throwing up blood, Isabella was encouraged by her family to seek medical attention.
After under going through an MRI scan, doctors discovered Isabella had developed a 4-centimeter tumour growing in the back of her brain, sized larger than a golf ball. “I don’t really remember much,” Strahan said of his daughter’s diagnosis. “I just remember trying to figure out how to get to [Los Angeles] ASAP. And it just doesn’t feel real. It just didn’t feel real.”
Although medulloblastoma is the most common type of cancerous brain tumour in children, as per to the Mayo Clinic, Strahan said that it’s “rarely” someone his daughter’s age is diagnosed with the condition.
The following day, Isabella underwent emergency surgery at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center on 27 October to remove the mass. After surgery, she went through one month of rehabilitation and several rounds of radiation treatment.
“So I just finished radiation therapy, which is proton radiation, and I got to ring the bell yesterday,” Isabella told cancer survivor Roberts. “It was great. It was very exciting because it’s been a long 30 sessions, 6 weeks.”
In the starting of February, the teenager will start chemotherapy at Duke Children’s Hospital and Health Center in Durham, North Carolina. “That’s my next step. I’m ready for it to began and be one day closer to being over,” Isabella said on GMA.