Scott Hamilton 2

[Agalia Valcin]

Inthis episode, Dr. Audrey Nath talks with figure skater, Olympic gold medalist, and cancer research advocate Scott Hamilton. Scott speaks about his brain tumor diagnosis and shares information about the CARES foundation where they fund innovative cancer research. Then, Dr. Nath talks with Dr. Chirag Patel, neuro-oncologist at Anderson Cancer Center. Dr. Patel explains more about different types of brain tumors and cancers, how they are diagnosed, and the various therapies that are available for treatment.

Dr. Correa:

I definitely do. I remember watching him not only skate, but then later on in the years helping me understand all the details and all the funny terms about skating because he was a commentator.

Dr. Nath:

Yeah. So he had a tumor, a pituitary adenoma, is kind of the long term for our listeners. And it's not a cancer, but it is a growth in this pituitary gland. It's a part of your brain that makes all these hormones. So even though it's not cancer, it still has to be dealt with because it affects hormone function. And he talks all about how that came to be and all the treatments he had to undergo.

Dr. Correa:

It brings up just that challenging understanding of what's tumor? What's cancer? I mean, it's just, we struggle with that. Even sometimes understanding it ourselves as doctors, but also the community that we take care of really have to have a better understanding of these things when these terms come up.

Dr. Nath:

Absolutely. And so, to talk more about brain tumors, after talking to Scott, I get to catch up with a good friend of mine, Chirag Patel, who's a neuro-oncologist. And we go through all about brain tumors and what's cancer and what's a benign mass that still has to be dealt with in the brain.

Dr. Nath:

You all, today, we are joined by figure skating legend, an icon of my childhood in the '80s and '90s, Scott Hamilton. Many of us grew up watching Scott Hamilton on TV, when he won the Olympic Gold Medal and World Championships and then, was a very likable skating commentator on CBS for many years. So, we could easily just spend the next hour talking about figure skating and I guess, how to do a back flip without crushing your head. But Scott, has an even more remarkable story to tell, which is how he's remained so resilient following surviving testicular cancer, and then a brain tumor, a pituitary adenoma, which needed to be treated with radiation to save his life. And then, living without the function of his pituitary gland. Despite all of this, he has gone on to have two children and be a major force in charities for brain tumors, including starting his own Scott Hamilton CARES Initiative, Cancer Alliance for Research, Education and Survivorship. Welcome to the podcast, Scott Hamilton.

Scott Hamilton:

The first 15 years of CARES, we were an initiative at the Cleveland Clinic, where I just wanted to take everything I learned from my cancer experience and just fill those gaping holes. The internet was relatively just getting populated, so I looked up testicular cancer and I got medical journal papers with 12 syllable words, sometimes like 6 to a sentence. And it was like, "Okay, this isn't fair." I asked a lot of questions and I kind of, as I experienced something, whether I was either flying blind or I was going through something that I just didn't understand, I had to pay attention to that. So two of the first things we did as an initiative at the Cleveland Clinic was to fill in those gaps. So one of them was, I didn't know how to do chemotherapy, I didn't even know what it was. So for five years, I was the organ grinder's monkey with my little hat going around collecting money to build Chemocare.com.

So a lot of oncology nurses and oncologists use Chemocare to sort allow patients to better understand the chemotherapy experience, the drugs, how they work, how to manage the side effects in 8th grade English and Spanish, and with Google Translate any language in the world. So now, we've kind of leveled the playing field. Now you can take these medications and understand what they're designed to do, and then what the side effects are and how to get ahead of or manage those side effects. And so, you can take charge of your chemotherapy experience where you couldn't before. The other thing I did initially at the Cleveland Clinic, and all those things are still run there, is we started a program called the 4th Angel Mentoring Program, where the first angel is your oncologist and second angel is your oncology nurse. You can flip those if you want. Those are your first two angels, right? Your third angel is your friends and family. And what was missing was the 4th angel. And the 4th angel is somebody who's been there, done that.

Scott Hamilton:

Has experienced everything you're experiencing and they're on the other side. And so, they can work as of a mentor, sort of a life coach. It's not medical advice, it's sort of like a psychosocial support system. And it's a relationship where it's like, how did you manage this? And it's also sort of a role modeling because the mentor is on the other side now, where you want to be and they can really work as a source of great inspiration and hope that you are where I want to be. I want to be through this and I want to get my life back. And how is that done? So the cancer community as a community, it's connected. And as patient survivors, we really truly just want to find better, novel, cleaner, healthier ways of treating the cancer and sparing the patient harm.

The alliance part of it as a dedicated foundation became a real focus as we went into and we put our stake in the ground saying, "We are only funding immunotherapy research, targeted therapy research. We only want to treat the cancer. We don't want to do anything that will affect the patient's long term life."

Dr. Nath:

Oh, wow. So I kind of want to know for our listeners, many who might be dealing with brain tumors. I kind of want to get a sense of what happened in the beginning since pituitary adenomas can have some very bizarre ways of presenting. I'm curious, what was the first thing that happened when you noticed there was something happening?

Scott Hamilton:

Well, there's a lot of those red herrings. It sort of distracts you into thinking that something happened against normal, right? So I was in my 40s and my eyesight was changing, because in your 40s your eyesight changes. I figured, well, I suffered a lot of trauma with surgeries and chemo and everything, I guess, that's supposed to happen. And then because I had my first child, I decided after 20 years of touring that I'd had enough. And that I just really wanted, I'd earned the right to be there for his first steps, his first words, and to be as present as a father as his mother was going to be. And so, I decided to step away, and in that, my physicality changed, my fitness level changed. And so, all of these things were explainable, even though I had a brain tumor that was growing rapidly in my optic chiasm, right?

So all of a sudden now, I was really feeling low and I was feeling almost depressed. It was hard to get out of bed. So I went in and they did blood work and thy said, "You have no testosterone in your bloodstream, like none." And I go, "That's really bizarre." And they go, "Well, we could treat you topically. We'll would just give you some gel and you'll get your levels up and you'll be good to go in a matter of weeks," I was like, "Okay, I can do that." But I still wasn't satisfied.

So every year I do a big benefit at the Cleveland Clinic to raise money for cancer research and our program. And I got there and I made an appointment with my urologist just to kind of like, I need to figure out how I can get back to at least having a general sense of energy and I want to be me again, right? Because I really felt like I diminished over the last few months to nothing. And so, he's laying away a lot of my symptoms. And then when I told him my peripheral vision was gone, he said, "Oh, let's get you in for a head scan."

Scott Hamilton:

So everything we do, I just try to handle it with humor. So I get back and Dr. Klein said, "You have a brain tumor. It's kind of complicated one, and we don't know what it is or how to treat it yet, but we're going to sit down and talk about this. But in the meantime, you just go back to the hotel, I think your family's arriving about now-

Scott Hamilton:

... and we'll just come up with some sort of strategy." So as I got back to the hotel, I was pulling up in a cab and my wife and son and her parents were coming out, unloading the car, and my 14 month old, brand new son. She goes, "What's going on?" I go, "I'll tell you upstairs." And so, we get upstairs and she goes, "What's happening?" And I go, "I have a brain tumor." And without one beat of hesitation, she just put her head down, took my hands, and she started to pray. And it was powerful. It was like, we're going to own this. We're going to just go to the one place where it surpasses all understanding to give us the strength to face this chapter in our lives. And so, she just prayed and it really just ignited something in me that was way different than anything I'd ever experienced before.

I call it the most powerful moment I ever lived through. And so, for the next week, they were trying to figure out what this was. And I had every test, every scan, everything you can imagine, every blood test, everything. And it finally got to the point where they said, "We have to do a biopsy." And so, they dug a little hole right there in my head. They went down into my optic chiasm. They went in and they did the surgery. And I woke up and it was 10:20 in the morning. I knew who I was, where I was, why I was there. And I just sort of leaned over and I went, test, "Oh, I can still speak. Oh, this is good, I guess, the surgery went well."

So the doctor came in smiling, my wife came in smiling, and they handed me a piece of paper, or they handed my wife a piece of paper, which is information on the kind of tumor it was. And she said, "Oh, listen to this," because I'll fill it in just a second. She said, "craniopharyngiomas are usually detected early in a child's life due to a lack of growth and development." I was in hospitals for four years, from age 4 to 8...

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