This column was going to be about Gary Carter and the brain tumor that killed him, but before I wrote it I wanted to reread the column I wrote on the same subject last June, days after Carter had been diagnosed with a glioblastoma, a deadly tumor.
I found that the column was the column I planned to write in the aftermath of Carter’s death last Thursday, and I decided rather than write a new column with basically the same information and comments that I would reprise (that’s a fancy word for repeat, as is redux) the one from June.
I will add a few thoughts. In the column, note that one of Carter’s doctors, Henry Friedman, said, “We’re seeing a small increase in the number of survivors,” but another doctor said, “Henry Friedman is always saying we’re making progress.”
As it unfortunately turned out, of the seven former baseball players who have died of glioblastoma tumors, Carter had the shortest survival from the time of diagnosis. He lived only eight and a half months.
As you will read, or as you might have read last June, I have a personal interest in brain tumors, especially malignant brain tumors. I was diagnosed with one just about nine years ago and have followed the subject closely since. I am, of course, delighted that I can follow it, but I never like hearing about someone being diagnosed with a brain tumor, let alone dying from one.
I have made one change in the original column, adding Carter to the list of his fellow players who died as he did.
Glioblastoma is not a baseball term. It does not appear in The Dickson Baseball Dictionary between “gliding” (“a flaw in a pitcher’s delivery”) and “global draft” (“a proposed international draft”). However, if Paul Dickson does a fourth edition of the dictionary, he might want to consider including this strange word that has burst into our consciousness.
Glioblastoma is the name of the brain tumor Gary Carter has been found to have. Names of brain tumors are as unintelligible as names of steroids. The people who deal with them know them and can distinguish one from another, but it’s not for the layman.
For example, who knows glioblastoma from hemangiopericytoma? If you do, go directly to medical school. There is a future for you in medicine.
Carter, the Hall of Fame catcher, is only the most recent former baseball player to have been diagnosed with glioblastoma, an aggressive (why not just say it, deadly) brain tumor that is as dreaded as its sound.
This is a roster of former players who were struck out by glioblastoma:
- Dick Howser 1987
- Dan Quisenberry 1998
- Tug McGraw 2004
- Johnny Oates 2004
- John Vukovich 2007
- Bobby Murcer 2008
- Gary Carter 2012
Two other former players, Bobby Bonds and Ken Brett, were stricken with brain tumors, but efforts to determine the kind were unsuccessful. Both died in 2003.
In Bonds’ case, he also had lung cancer and kidney cancer, and he had open-heart surgery, suffering all of those ailments within a little more than a year before he died.
George Brett said Saturday he didn’t know the name of the tumor his brother had but that he actually had two tumors at different times. Ken was fine for three or four years after the first tumor was removed, Brettt said, but got another and didn’t survive that one for long.
Glioblastoma victims rarely survive for long. Here is the same list of players with the length of time they lived after they were diagnosed with the tumor:
- Oates 38 months
- Murcer 19 months
- Vukovich 18 months
- Howser 12 months
- Quisenberry 9 months
- McGraw 9 months
- Carter 8 ½ months
Putting their post-diagnosis lives in perspective, consider these statistics from the Central Brain Tumor Registry of the United States. The registry lists 14 types of brain tumors with total cases and survival rates.
Glioblastomas, which represent 17 percent of all primary brain tumors, provided by far the most cases, nearly 20,000, and produced, again by far, the lowest survival rates.
When Carter was diagnosed, a newspaper columnist came up with a link among the baseball players who had glioblastomas. Most of them played or coached in stadiums that had artificial turf – Kansas City, Philadelphia, Montreal.
If that connection were valid, though, that would account for only six deaths [now seven]. What about the other 19,791 deaths recorded in the most recent statistical study?
“Brain tumors do not discriminate,” the American Brain Tumor Association says on its Web site, abta.org. “Primary brain tumors – those that begin in the brain and tend to stay in the brain – occur in people of all ages, but they are statistically more frequent in children and older adults.”
Of 19,797 patients who were diagnosed in the period 1995-2007, only 34.6 percent survived one year. That means 65 percent of glioblastoma victims died within a year after they were diagnosed. The percentages dropped from there: 12.63 percent survived two years, 7.31 percent three years, 5.40 percent four years, 4.75 percent five years and only 2.80 percent, or 554 of 19,797, were alive 10 years later.
Despite the awful statistics, one neuro-oncologist, Carter’s, takes a positive approach to survival. “The survival rate is increasing,” Dr. Henry Friedman said in a telephone interview Saturday. “We’re seeing a small increase in the number of survivors.”
Dr. Friedman offered no numbers to support his view, and another doctor who is intimately involved with brain tumors said he was not convinced that claim is valid, “Henry Friedman is always saying we’re making progress,” he said.
Friedman is co-deputy director of the Preston Robert Tisch Brain Center at Duke University. The center conducts clinical trials seeking treatment methods that will at least extend patients’ lives. It is a difficult, if not impossible, task. My wife’s 42-year-old nephew, Michael Levine, was in one of the Duke trials, but he died in April, less than two years after he was diagnosed.
Murcer, the popular New York Yankees’ center fielder and later broadcaster, was in a clinical trial at M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston in 2008 and seemed to be doing well, responding to treatment for several months. But he suddenly stopped making progress, went the other way and died.
In my first conversation after he had been diagnosed with glioblastoma, I was able to make him forget about his deadly tumor for a minute or two. I told him about my encounter with a brain tumor. He couldn’t believe what I was telling him.
I’ll leave most of what I told him for another time, but I relate the brain tumor part of it because I am writing this column on June 4, the eighth anniversary of the operation that made me tumor free.
Hemangiopericytoma – that was the name of my tumor. It was malignant, though we didn’t know that ugly fact for two and a half months because I had I had been transferred to another hospital, and the neurosurgeon’s office had ignored my wife’s repeated requests for a pathology report.
When we eventually learned that the tumor was malignant, we told very few people. We preferred our privacy. I guess sports stars have to make their cancers public. Carter announces his brain tumor. Harmon Killebrew announces his impending death from esophageal cancer.
I never had any doubt that I would survive even though I had no basis for that feeling except for my ultra-positive attitude and my wife, the most wonderful advocate a hospitalized man could have.
I don’t know what the survival rate is for malignant hemangiopericytoma even now because it didn’t make the glioblastoma list, and I didn’t ask. I am told it is a very rare tumor so there are probably no statistics.
I do know that I prefer hemangiopericytoma to glioblastoma, but I also would have preferred a benign tumor to a malignant one. I know people who have had benign brain tumors. I know a woman who had one, had it removed and went back to work the second week after surgery.
Why are some tumors benign and some malignant? Why is one malignant tumor a hemangiopericytoma and another a glioblastoma?
“No one knows the answer to that; that’s the Nobel Prize,” said Dr. Jeffrey Bruce, a neurosurgeon at Columbia University Medical Center and a member of the Scientific Advisory Council of the American Brain Tumor Association.
Bruce said a combination of genetics and environment could create differences. Location also makes a difference, he added. “Mostly location and how invasive it is into the brain.”
Location was also cited by Dr. John Golfinos, chairman of the neurosurgery department at New York University Langone Medical Center.
“Think about tumors that grow away from other parts of the body; you get to them early and take them out,” Golfinos said “You can’t remove the brain. Other cancers push away. A brain tumor follows the brain path and you get to the stage of malignancy.”
I asked Golfinos how doctors deal with terrible tumors. At N.Y.U., he said, he has the responsibility of speaking to families of patients.
“It’s very difficult for the families,” he said, “because the patient changes before the family’s eyes.”
Sadly, Carter’s family soon learned the reality of that statement.
MORE MARLINS BUNGLING ON BARGER
Can the Miami Marlins make themselves look more foolish than they already have? Yes, it seems.
First, the team’s president said the Marlins had spoken to Carl Barger’s family, which they hadn’t, about the decision to unretire No. 5, which they had retired in his honor in 1993. Then they belatedly talked to one of Barger’s two daughters but apparently not about No. 5.
David Samson, the Marlins’ president, said last week that “it’s my understanding” that the club had contacted the Barger family about its decision to rescind the honor paid Barger, the Marlins’ first president, who died in 1992 four months before the Marlins played their first game.
The honor, bestowed by H. Wayne Huizenga, the founding owner, was the retirement of No. 5 on a Marlins’ uniform, the number of Barger’s favorite player, Joe DiMaggio. However, last week Jeffrey Loria, the current owner, decided to unretire No. 5 and give it to Logan Morrison, the Marlins’ left fielder, who wanted to wear it to honor his late father, whose favorite player, George Brett, wore No. 5.
Besides their classless decision, the Marlins had not contacted the Barger family despite Samson’s “understanding. In the light of developments, it’s even questionable that they had tried to reach the Bargers.
In their latest version the Marlins said they had tried reaching the Bargers for several months. However, Joe Capozzi, the Marlins’ beat writer for the Palm Beach Post, reported that it took a Post researcher, Niels Heimeriks, and him five minutes to reach Betzi Barger, a daughter of the late executive. Heimeriks found the telephone number, and Capozzi called her, the reporter wrote. It was the first Barger had heard of the Marlins’ plan.
Capozzi wrote that he gave the Marlins Betzi Barger’s number, and P.J. Loyello, head of communications, called her.
The Post quoted Loyello as saying the team’s decision on No. 5 never came up in the five-minute conversation. I wondered why else did he call her, but he didn’t return telephone calls for me to ask him that question.
“I explained our situation, Loyello told the Post, telling her that the plan was to “put a plaque up and we’d let her know when it’s up and we’ll stay in touch on it and that was it.”
But no mention of stripping her father of the honor of the retired number? Just another day in the bizarre life of the Marlins.