Michael Strahan sat alongside his 19-year-old daughter, Isabella, as she bravely opened up about her brain tumor battle.
Appearing on Good Morning America on Thursday, January 11, the GMA co-anchor revealed his daughter’s malignant brain tumor diagnosis known as medulloblastoma.
“I literally think that in a lot of ways, I’m the luckiest man in the world because I’ve got an amazing daughter,” Strahan told his fellow co-anchorRobin Roberts. “I know she’s going through it, but I know that we’re never given more than we can handle and that she is going to crush this.”
Isabella shared how the diagnosis came in October, nearly one month into her studies as a freshman at the University of Southern California. The teenager was experiencing headaches that she initially thought were a cause of vertigo. On Oct. 25, she realized her condition had worsened.
“I didn’t notice anything was off till probably like Oct. 1,” she said. “That’s when I definitely noticed headaches, nausea, couldn’t walk straight.”
“I woke up, probably at like, 1 p.m. I dreaded waking up. But I was throwing up blood,” she recalled. “I was like, ‘Hm, this probably isn’t good.’ So I texted [my sister], who then notified the whole family.”
As her symptoms persisted, Michael Strahan encouraged his daughter to seek medical attention.
“That was when we decided, ‘You need to really go get a thorough checkup,'” he said. “And thank goodness for the doctor. I feel like this doctor saved her life because she was thorough enough to say, ‘Let’s do the full checkup.'”
After an EKG and MRI, Isabella’s doctor urged her to go to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center where Isabella learned she was developing a fast-growing 4-centimeter tumor, bigger than a golf ball, in the back of her brain.
According to the Journal of Clinical Neuroscience, about 500 children are diagnosed with medulloblastoma each year. It accounts for about 20% of all childhood brain tumors.
“But rarely someone who’s 18, 19 years old,” Michael Strahan said. “But it’s still scary because it’s still so much to go through. And the hardest thing to get over is to think that she has to go through this herself.”
On Oct. 27, the day before her 19th birthday, Isabella underwent emergency surgery to remove the mass. After surgery, Isabella went through a 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,” she said. “It was great. It was very exciting because it’s been a long 30 sessions, six weeks.”
In February, Isabella will start chemotherapy at Duke Children’s Hospital & Health Center in Durham, North Carolina.
“That’s my next step. I’m ready for it to start and be one day closer to being over,” she said.
As part of her journey, Isabella has partnered with Duke to document her journey in a new YouTube
series.“It’s been like, two months of keeping it quiet, which is definitely difficult,” she said. “I don’t wanna hide it anymore, ’cause it’s hard to always keep in. I hope to just kind of be a voice, and be [someone] who people, maybe [those who] are going through chemotherapy or radiation can look at.”