Olympian Scott Hamilton ‘At Peace’ with Not Having Third Brain Tumor Removed
By Movieguide® Contributor
Ice skating gold medalist Scott Hamilton is saying no to surgery after discovering his third brain tumor.
The 65-year-old has “gone through surgery twice, first when he was diagnosed with a brain tumor in 2004, and then again when it returned in 2010,” PEOPLE reported.
Movieguide® reported how his brain tumor helped him draw closer to God:
Ultimately, the brain tumors have helped Hamilton more than hurt him.
“This brain tumor has given me a lot more than it has taken away,” he revealed. “This is a brain tumor I was born with. Without it I wouldn’t have been in and out of hospitals for four years. Without this my parents wouldn’t have been so exhausted that they needed to give me a morning off, and the morning off they chose was a skating rink. There are no accidents.”
“When I learned of this diagnosis, two things came to my mind. I have to draw closer to God and I have to get physically strong,” Hamilton continued. “And I have been doing both.”
“Hamilton has had to face his fears many times in life, from learning to skate as a little kid to dealing with the grief of losing his mother to breast cancer in 1977,” PEOPLE said. “He also faced testicular cancer in 1997, from which he successfully recovered after surgery and chemotherapy.”
Hamilton learned of his third tumor in 2016. Unlike with his previous tumors, this time, he didn’t want to treat it.
“When they gave me the diagnosis, they said, it’s back,” he told PEOPLE. “And so they brought in this guy, a really young, talented surgeon, and he said, ‘We could do the surgery again. It’d be complicated, but we’ve got really talented people here that we could bring in, and I know we could pull it off if that’s an option for you.'”
“But Hamilton says that the entire time the surgeon was talking, his mind was elsewhere,” PEOPLE said. “He’d already gone through surgery twice, first when he was diagnosed with a brain tumor in 2004, and then again when it returned in 2010.”
An artery in his brain was struck in his last surgery, which resulted in complications and nine more surgeries to treat it.
“All I felt was just, don’t worry about this. Just go home and get strong,” he said. “They go, ‘Well, what do you want to do?’ And I said, ‘I think I’m going to go home and get strong.'”
“It’s been remarkable,” he continued. “I went back to the scan three months later and they said, it hasn’t grown. I go back three months later and they go, it shrank 45%. I said to my surgeon, ‘Can you explain this?’ And he said, ‘God.’ I went back in, and it shrunk 25% again.”
But on his fourth check, the tumor had grown. Now the ice skater is “totally at peace with not even looking” at its size again unless he becomes symptomatic.
If he does become symptomatic, he still plans to avoid surgery.
“The ace I have up my sleeve is that now there is a targeted radiation therapy that will shrink the tumor,” he said. “And in that, I can avoid a lot of other things like surgery and chemo. So I don’t know, I’m mostly trying to be in the moment and taking all the information and do the right thing when the time comes.”
Hamilton’s brain tumor isn’t cancerous, but he did survive testicular cancer in 1997. Now, the olympian heads the Scott Hamilton CARES Foundation, which he created to help fund cancer research. It focuses on discovering treatments that are less toxic to patients.
Hamilton also celebrated his 40th anniversary of winning gold at the 1984 Sarajevo Winter Olympics on Feb. 16.
“40 years ago today, on a podium next to my friends @brianorser and Jozef Sabovčík, my life changed forever,” he said on Instagram. “Never would I have guessed this very moment would lead to decades of impact in the worlds of figure skating and cancer research, but I’m glad God had a bigger and better plan for my life.”
