Gamma Knife

The year my dad was diagnosed with lung cancer was my seventh grade year and I was really close to my dad. He was diagnosed in January and they did chemo therapy, which never really affected my dad, and radiation that also never really affected him. My dad was positive throughout this whole ordeal, just like he was with the glioblastoma, his first brain tumor, which was amazing because most people, the second time they are diagnosed with cancer become discouraged. My dad always kept a great attitude, which helped my mom, sister, and I deal with this horrible diagnosis. My dad was cleared in March from the lung cancer, which was great! I know I had never heard better news, my dad was in remission, and that didn’t mean he was cured, but to us it might as well have, we were all extremely happy, but that all changed very quickly.

                Less than a month after my dad was cleared from the lung cancer my dad an MRI just like he had, had every three months since his first diagnosis. This had became a pretty routine thing for us, once every three months my mom and dad would go to Terre Haute in the morning, after one of them dropped me off at school, eat at Cracker Barrel for breakfast, and then go to Indiana MRI over in Terre Haute and then go to Providence Medical Center and talk to Dr. Huh, my dad’s primary oncologist, and the one doctor who has stayed a constant throughout my dad’s entire battle with cancer. This time was different, they went to Cracker Barrel like always and it all seemed pretty normal, but my dad’s teeth had been hurting, which is something odd that has happened every time he has had a brain tumor. He did not mention this to any of us because he was afraid of what it could mean. Everything went normal, but then a little over a week later Dr. Huh called our house asking for my mom and dad to come back over to Terre Haute so they could discuss the results of the MRI, at this point we all knew something was wrong because Dr. Huh usually just gave us the MRI results over the phone.

It turned out that my dad had another tumor in his brain, but Dr. Huh told us it did not look like a recurrence of the glioblastoma, that it was probably a metastasized tumor from the lung cancer. This is when we first heard the term Gamma Knife. Gamma Knife, it’s a scary sounding term and at that time it was highly experimental and we had no idea if would work. A Gamma Knife is a form of radiation that is about a hundred different radiation beams all focused on one point it is highly potent and my dad’s procedure was one of the first performed in the state of Indiana. It was a success and my dad went back into remission shortly after.