duncan228
06-16-2008, 10:24 PM
This article came out before Sunday's game.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/15/sports/basketball/15fisher.html?pagewanted=1&ei=5087&em&en=1e0302fdff545332&ex=1213761600
Lakers’ Fisher Made His Plea for All to See
By HOWARD BECK
LOS ANGELES — It is probably a stretch to say that Derek Fisher saved lives with a cross-country flight, a 3-pointer and a breathless moment of candor in a nationally televised postgame interview. Dr. David Abramson, however, does not think so.
Thirteen months ago in New York, Abramson treated Fisher’s 10-month-old daughter, Tatum, for a rare and deadly form of eye cancer. That night, in one of the most dramatic scenes in N.B.A. playoff history, Fisher returned to Salt Lake City with his family, raced to the arena and made three huge plays to fuel a Utah Jazz victory.
His emotions still raw, Fisher gave a live interview on TNT. He described his family’s ordeal. And he urged parents to have their children checked for a disease few had probably ever heard of: retinoblastoma.
The impact of that unscripted moment is still being felt.
“He has done more for the field, more for patients, than I have done in the last 30 years, of 50 lectures and 400 publications,” Abramson, considered the world’s leading authority on retinoblastoma, said last week in a telephone interview. “What he’s done has been enormous and profound.”
It is hard to quantify how great an impact Fisher made that night. But Abramson can see it every day in his waiting room at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in Manhattan.
He has been visited by families from Vietnam, Germany, Saudi Arabia, England, Italy and India. One day, he saw an Israeli family from Jerusalem and a Palestinian family from East Jerusalem.
“Probably the only time they had sat in the same room,” he said. “When I asked them why they had come, their story was the exact same: they had heard about the basketball player’s child.”
Abramson and his team saved the eyes, and the lives, of both children.
Tatum is now a spirited, headstrong toddler — “kind of the boss of the house,” according to Fisher’s wife, Candace — who loves ketchup, Elmo and painted toenails. Tatum and her twin brother, Drew, turn 2 on June 29 and will celebrate (along with their older siblings, Chloe and Marshall), with a Sesame Street-themed party. Fisher is back with his original team, the Los Angeles Lakers, who play the Boston Celtics on Sunday in Game 5 of the N.B.A. finals.
The Jazz agreed to cancel Fisher’s contract last summer so he could move to a city where Tatum could receive follow-up care. She is examined monthly at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles by a longtime colleague of Abramson’s. The family visits Abramson every other month.
“Every time I go there, I have a couple people who tell us they saw him on TV or heard about Tatum,” Candace Fisher said.
Retinoblastoma afflicts an estimated 5,000 children a year worldwide and kills about half of them. Until recently, there was only one cure: remove the eye. Abramson has removed more than 1,000.
Everything changed in 2006, when Abramson, the chief of Ophthalmic Oncology Service at Sloan-Kettering, along with two colleagues, developed a technique called intra-arterial chemotherapy, which shrinks and kills the tumor. Doctors inject a drug through a tiny blood vessel in the eye and, within 15 seconds, the drug is “stuck inside” the cancer.
“The cancer either just disappears, the body literally eats it up, or it becomes calcification,” said Abramson, who developed the treatment with Dr. Pierre Gobin, an interventional neuroradiologist, and Dr. Ira Dunkel, a pediatric oncologist. “Not one of us could have done this alone.”
Unlike other forms of chemotherapy, the intra-arterial technique does not make patients sick or require hospitalization, and it usually requires only three doses. Many of the children get their vision back. Tatum has regained about 30 to 40 percent of her vision, according to Candace Fisher.
Because the treatment is in the clinical trial stage, it was not widely known about until Derek Fisher made it a national story. Tatum was the ninth patient treated between May 2006 and May 2007. According to Candace Fisher, the number is now approaching 100.
Under the terms of the clinical trial, Abramson was not permitted to discuss statistics but said he was “doing between two and four treatments a week.” His patients’ average age is 3 to 6 months old. Among the most advanced cases of retinoblastoma, his team has saved more than 50 percent of the eyes. “We’ve learned where this works and where it doesn’t work,” he said.
Derek Fisher learned about the procedure mostly by chance. After Tatum’s illness was diagnosed, Fisher asked his personal trainer, a registered nurse, to find everything he could online, and present him with every option. Saving Tatum’s life was the priority, but he was hopeful that there was a way to save her eye, too. The trainer found Abramson, who has been working on retinoblastoma since the early 1970s.
Fisher had seen an informational pamphlet written by Abramson in a pediatrician’s office in Salt Lake City. But, he said, “we had to take it upon ourselves to go to him.”
Fisher added, “The question is how to empower parents and families to be able to make these decisions for themselves and their children and not feel guilt or pressure to take the diagnosis they’ve been given.”
By telling Tatum’s story, Fisher has made that possible for countless families around the world. It took an improbable and dramatic chain of events last May for that to happen.
After spending three days in New York — and missing the first game of Utah’s playoff series against Golden State — Fisher and his family flew back to Salt Lake City on May 9. When they landed, Game 2 was well under way. A police escort took them from the airport to the arena. Coach Jerry Sloan had kept Fisher on the active roster, but Fisher was not sure what he would do.
He told Candace he wanted to show up and support his teammates, but said, “If you don’t want me to go over to the arena at all, I won’t go.” Candace said go. Fisher arrived in the third quarter, with cameras trailing him. A powerful ovation greeted him when he came out of the tunnel, in uniform, a short time later.
Fisher flustered Baron Davis into a turnover late in the fourth quarter, then contested Davis’s potential game-winning shot at the buzzer. In overtime, Fisher made his only field goal — a 3-pointer that gave the Jazz a 6-point lead with 1 minute 6 seconds to play. He hit two free throws to help secure the victory.
On most nights, a star player like Deron Williams or Carlos Boozer would be summoned for the live interview on the court. But TNT asked for Fisher. He and Candace had agreed to keep their daughter’s condition private. But the moment overwhelmed him.
He mentioned Tatum’s operation, said her life had been in jeopardy, then uttered the word that sent people scrambling for dictionaries: retinoblastoma. He urged parents to take their young children to the ophthalmologist. “I didn’t know before I said it,” Fisher said, “but in the moment that I was saying it, I just felt that if I shared it, it would be helpful in some way.”
Because Fisher spoke, parents who were unaware of the disease had their children checked. Parents who thought the only cure for the disease was eye removal found another option. Dozens of boys and girls got their vision back.
“If we’re helping one, if we’re helping 100, it’s amazing all the way around,” Candace Fisher said.
Word also spread quickly through the offices at Sloan-Kettering. Doctors, many of them N.B.A. fans, came to Abramson to ask about the intra-arterial technique. It has since been adapted to treat other forms of cancer, including brain tumors.
“It’s been kind of weird, but wonderful,” Abramson said. “Who would have predicted that as a result of Derek Fisher speaking at a basketball game, we would now have a new approach to treating brain tumors?”
When the Lakers and the Celtics play on Sunday, the entire Fisher family will be at Staples Center to root for Derek. Tatum is a little young to understand the game. But she can see it clearly enough.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/15/sports/basketball/15fisher.html?pagewanted=1&ei=5087&em&en=1e0302fdff545332&ex=1213761600
Lakers’ Fisher Made His Plea for All to See
By HOWARD BECK
LOS ANGELES — It is probably a stretch to say that Derek Fisher saved lives with a cross-country flight, a 3-pointer and a breathless moment of candor in a nationally televised postgame interview. Dr. David Abramson, however, does not think so.
Thirteen months ago in New York, Abramson treated Fisher’s 10-month-old daughter, Tatum, for a rare and deadly form of eye cancer. That night, in one of the most dramatic scenes in N.B.A. playoff history, Fisher returned to Salt Lake City with his family, raced to the arena and made three huge plays to fuel a Utah Jazz victory.
His emotions still raw, Fisher gave a live interview on TNT. He described his family’s ordeal. And he urged parents to have their children checked for a disease few had probably ever heard of: retinoblastoma.
The impact of that unscripted moment is still being felt.
“He has done more for the field, more for patients, than I have done in the last 30 years, of 50 lectures and 400 publications,” Abramson, considered the world’s leading authority on retinoblastoma, said last week in a telephone interview. “What he’s done has been enormous and profound.”
It is hard to quantify how great an impact Fisher made that night. But Abramson can see it every day in his waiting room at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in Manhattan.
He has been visited by families from Vietnam, Germany, Saudi Arabia, England, Italy and India. One day, he saw an Israeli family from Jerusalem and a Palestinian family from East Jerusalem.
“Probably the only time they had sat in the same room,” he said. “When I asked them why they had come, their story was the exact same: they had heard about the basketball player’s child.”
Abramson and his team saved the eyes, and the lives, of both children.
Tatum is now a spirited, headstrong toddler — “kind of the boss of the house,” according to Fisher’s wife, Candace — who loves ketchup, Elmo and painted toenails. Tatum and her twin brother, Drew, turn 2 on June 29 and will celebrate (along with their older siblings, Chloe and Marshall), with a Sesame Street-themed party. Fisher is back with his original team, the Los Angeles Lakers, who play the Boston Celtics on Sunday in Game 5 of the N.B.A. finals.
The Jazz agreed to cancel Fisher’s contract last summer so he could move to a city where Tatum could receive follow-up care. She is examined monthly at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles by a longtime colleague of Abramson’s. The family visits Abramson every other month.
“Every time I go there, I have a couple people who tell us they saw him on TV or heard about Tatum,” Candace Fisher said.
Retinoblastoma afflicts an estimated 5,000 children a year worldwide and kills about half of them. Until recently, there was only one cure: remove the eye. Abramson has removed more than 1,000.
Everything changed in 2006, when Abramson, the chief of Ophthalmic Oncology Service at Sloan-Kettering, along with two colleagues, developed a technique called intra-arterial chemotherapy, which shrinks and kills the tumor. Doctors inject a drug through a tiny blood vessel in the eye and, within 15 seconds, the drug is “stuck inside” the cancer.
“The cancer either just disappears, the body literally eats it up, or it becomes calcification,” said Abramson, who developed the treatment with Dr. Pierre Gobin, an interventional neuroradiologist, and Dr. Ira Dunkel, a pediatric oncologist. “Not one of us could have done this alone.”
Unlike other forms of chemotherapy, the intra-arterial technique does not make patients sick or require hospitalization, and it usually requires only three doses. Many of the children get their vision back. Tatum has regained about 30 to 40 percent of her vision, according to Candace Fisher.
Because the treatment is in the clinical trial stage, it was not widely known about until Derek Fisher made it a national story. Tatum was the ninth patient treated between May 2006 and May 2007. According to Candace Fisher, the number is now approaching 100.
Under the terms of the clinical trial, Abramson was not permitted to discuss statistics but said he was “doing between two and four treatments a week.” His patients’ average age is 3 to 6 months old. Among the most advanced cases of retinoblastoma, his team has saved more than 50 percent of the eyes. “We’ve learned where this works and where it doesn’t work,” he said.
Derek Fisher learned about the procedure mostly by chance. After Tatum’s illness was diagnosed, Fisher asked his personal trainer, a registered nurse, to find everything he could online, and present him with every option. Saving Tatum’s life was the priority, but he was hopeful that there was a way to save her eye, too. The trainer found Abramson, who has been working on retinoblastoma since the early 1970s.
Fisher had seen an informational pamphlet written by Abramson in a pediatrician’s office in Salt Lake City. But, he said, “we had to take it upon ourselves to go to him.”
Fisher added, “The question is how to empower parents and families to be able to make these decisions for themselves and their children and not feel guilt or pressure to take the diagnosis they’ve been given.”
By telling Tatum’s story, Fisher has made that possible for countless families around the world. It took an improbable and dramatic chain of events last May for that to happen.
After spending three days in New York — and missing the first game of Utah’s playoff series against Golden State — Fisher and his family flew back to Salt Lake City on May 9. When they landed, Game 2 was well under way. A police escort took them from the airport to the arena. Coach Jerry Sloan had kept Fisher on the active roster, but Fisher was not sure what he would do.
He told Candace he wanted to show up and support his teammates, but said, “If you don’t want me to go over to the arena at all, I won’t go.” Candace said go. Fisher arrived in the third quarter, with cameras trailing him. A powerful ovation greeted him when he came out of the tunnel, in uniform, a short time later.
Fisher flustered Baron Davis into a turnover late in the fourth quarter, then contested Davis’s potential game-winning shot at the buzzer. In overtime, Fisher made his only field goal — a 3-pointer that gave the Jazz a 6-point lead with 1 minute 6 seconds to play. He hit two free throws to help secure the victory.
On most nights, a star player like Deron Williams or Carlos Boozer would be summoned for the live interview on the court. But TNT asked for Fisher. He and Candace had agreed to keep their daughter’s condition private. But the moment overwhelmed him.
He mentioned Tatum’s operation, said her life had been in jeopardy, then uttered the word that sent people scrambling for dictionaries: retinoblastoma. He urged parents to take their young children to the ophthalmologist. “I didn’t know before I said it,” Fisher said, “but in the moment that I was saying it, I just felt that if I shared it, it would be helpful in some way.”
Because Fisher spoke, parents who were unaware of the disease had their children checked. Parents who thought the only cure for the disease was eye removal found another option. Dozens of boys and girls got their vision back.
“If we’re helping one, if we’re helping 100, it’s amazing all the way around,” Candace Fisher said.
Word also spread quickly through the offices at Sloan-Kettering. Doctors, many of them N.B.A. fans, came to Abramson to ask about the intra-arterial technique. It has since been adapted to treat other forms of cancer, including brain tumors.
“It’s been kind of weird, but wonderful,” Abramson said. “Who would have predicted that as a result of Derek Fisher speaking at a basketball game, we would now have a new approach to treating brain tumors?”
When the Lakers and the Celtics play on Sunday, the entire Fisher family will be at Staples Center to root for Derek. Tatum is a little young to understand the game. But she can see it clearly enough.