Reclaiming Life After Cancer
- Isabella Strahan, 20, daughter of Good Morning America anchor Michael Strahan, is chronicling her brain cancer fight in a new documentary, Life Interrupted: Isabella Strahan’s Fight to Beat Cancer.
- The documentary shows personal, behind-the-scenes footage of her medulloblastoma tumor and the toll that it took on her and her family following her October 2023 diagnosis.
- Medulloblastoma is a rare primary central nervous system tumor. This type of brain tumor is cancerous and proliferates, making it more likely to spread to other parts of the body. Immediate treatment was needed, including surgery to remove most of the tumor, followed by radiation and chemotherapy.
- Brain tumors account for 85-90% of all primary central nervous system (CNS) tumors, according to the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO). General symptoms may include headache, nausea, vomiting, blurred vision, balance problems, personality or behavior changes, seizures, drowsiness, or even coma.
The model and internet personality, daughter of Good Morning America anchor Michael Strahan, released Life Interrupted: Isabella Strahan’s Fight to Beat Cancer, on Hulu.
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According to Cleveland Clinic, the cerebellum “holds more than half of the neurons (cells the make up your nervous system) in your whole body.”
When Isabella first started experiencing vertigo, she wasn’t too concerned about it, and her dad admitted that he had worried she might be “burning the candle” while at school, and had wondered what was going on.
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But Isabella started having increasingly worrying symptoms such as headaches, nausea and vomiting blood, along with having issues with her balance. Thankfully, she pursued a medical assessment. Her doctor, Michelle Israel, MD, stated in the film that “alarm bells rang, and I knew at that point she needed an MRI urgently.”
She found a kiwi-sized mass. Describing the severity of the situation, Dr. Israel said “she was actually in danger of having a stroke and potentially dying.”
The day before her 19th birthday, Isabella was diagnosed with brain cancer.
“You don’t really expect the worst until you get told the worst,” she told the camera while recalling the tragic time. Her sister described her own reaction to the news, saying she “couldn’t even process it really,” she was “just in shock.”
Needing immediate surgery, Isabella underwent a five-hour craniotomy, which is the temporary removal of part of the skull to get to the brain. She also went through radiation and four rounds of chemotherapy, with the camera following some of these more difficult moments in the hospital.
In one image, Isabella looked defeated, her father and sister standing on each side of her as she is hunched down in a hospital bed, a stuffed animal set up beside her.
Her dad recounted his daughter telling him, “I’ll do whatever I’ve gotta do, I just don’t want to die.”
“Wow,” is he all he could say of the weight of those words from his little girl hitting him.
Roughly nine months later, in July 2024, the tone turned positive as Isabella announced that she was cancer-free. “It’s really great… to feel free,” she said of learning her overwhelmingly good news.
“I am alive. Isn’t that a beautiful thing,” she later announced in a modeling campaign video for Kenneth Cole, which showcased Isabella as a survivor and beacon of hope for the cancer community.
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By August 2024, the teen was back to school to resume her college life of being an everyday freshman, and continues to build her modeling portfolio as she pursues her journalism degree.
Building Resilience
SurvivorNet specializes in covering the lives of people who overcome seemingly insurmountable obstacles. Often, seeing the positive helps them maintain their resilience.
Dr. Zuri Murrell, an oncologist at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, spoke to SurvivorNet about the role of a positive outlook on survival rates: “I’m pretty good at telling what kind of patient are going to still have this attitude and probably going to live the longest, even with bad, bad disease. And those are patients who, they have gratitude in life.”
How Can Gratitude Lead to a Healthier Mindset?
Resilience is an important trait, but not the easiest to build. The ultimate goal is not to avoid tough times, but to be able to bounce back from them. And yet, when they are faced with an overwhelming, life-changing situation, how do people shift their view? How do they learn to see the problem as temporary, rather than permanent, and figure out a solution?
It’s complicated, because building resilience is more about your mental and emotional fortitude than anything else.
Facing A Challenge With Positivity
According to the American Psychological Association, “the resources and skills associated with more positive adaptation (i.e., greater resilience) can be cultivated and practiced.” In other words, resilience is not something you’re born with, which should be encouraging. Instead, after every challenge in your life, you build more and more resilience to those hard times.
You can build resilience the way you build muscle — through patience and steady exercise of the skill.
Types of Brain Cancer
Medullablastoma was “originally classified as a glioma, but is now referred to as a “neuro-ectodermal tumor,” according to the Asian Journal of Neurosurgery.
This type of brain tumor begins near the brainstem in the cerebellum and is more common in children, according to the Cleveland Clinic. It is fast-growing and can spread to other areas of the brain and spinal cord.
A glioma is a tumor originating in the central nervous system (CNS), specifically in the brain or spinal cord. A glioma originates in glial cells. Glial cells are supportive cells in the brain that protect and maintain the neurons. These types of tumors can either be benign (non-cancerous) or malignant (cancerous).
“Glioma is a broad term that refers to a whole range of different types of primary brain tumors,” Dr. Alexandra Miller, Director of the Neuro-Oncologist Division at NYU Langone Health, previously told SurvivorNet.
“They’re tumors that originate in the brain and very rarely spread outside the brain to other parts of the body,” Dr. Miller continued.
Glioblastoma (GBM) is the most aggressive and lethal form of primary brain tumor. Classified as a grade 4 glioma by the World Health Organization (WHO), glioblastoma presents significant challenges for treatment due to its highly invasive nature, rapid growth, and resistance to most conventional therapies.
Dr. Alexandra Miller explains what glioma is.
Treatment Options for Gliomas
“The first step is always the neurosurgery. How much can you take out? Is it safe to do surgery? Do you have to rely on a biopsy? Can you even do a biopsy?” Dr. Henry Friedman, Deputy Director of the Preston Robert Tisch Brain Tumor Center at Duke, told SurvivorNet.
Some gliomas are benign, small, and don’t cause symptoms. These may be eligible for observation rather than treatment.
If a tumor is considered operable, surgery is often the first-line treatment for gliomas, with the goal of achieving maximal safe resection, where the largest amount of tumor is removed without causing significant neurologic deficits. For low-grade gliomas, surgery alone can sometimes be curative.
Glioma treatment: What are my options?
After surgery, pathologists examine the tumor tissue to understand its features and molecular makeup. This added step helps doctors outline an appropriate treatment.
“We go through a very elaborate process of diagnostics, which includes looking at it under the microscope through our pathology team,” Dr. Friedman explained to SurvivorNet.
Radiation and chemotherapy are often needed after surgery because removing the tumor completely is usually not possible due to the tumor’s ability to spread into surrounding brain tissue.
Additional treatments might include:
- Radiation therapy uses high-energy X-rays to target and kill tumor cells. It is often used after surgery to target residual tumor cells.
- Chemotherapy drugs kill or slow the growth of cancer cells. Chemotherapy can be used alongside radiation or following radiation and is often used in higher-grade tumors.
- The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has also approved some drug treatments, including temozolomide (Temodar), to help patients with this aggressive disease. Temozolomide is a chemotherapy drug patients can take after surgery and radiation therapy.
- Targeted therapy and immunotherapy are newer treatments designed to target specific genetic mutations in the tumor or to stimulate the immune system to fight the cancer. Their role in the treatment of gliomas is continuing to evolve.
The FDA also recently approved Vorasidenib, an IDH inhibitor for low-grade gliomas. It works by blocking the mutated enzyme, slowing tumor growth, and extending the time before disease progression. IDH mutant gliomas tend to grow more slowly and have a better prognosis than IDH wild-type gliomas.
Dr. Miller told SurvivorNet that Vorasidenib is a “huge breakthrough for people with IDH mutant tumors.”
Vorasidenib: A “huge breakthrough” for low-grade gliomas
Contributing: SurvivorNet Staff
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