WNC BRAIN TUMOR SUPPORT

On a baseball field one hot summer evening in 1967, eleven-year-old George Plym watched a ball sailing toward him. As the moment approached to make the catch, he couldn’t make up his mind which ball to reach for — Plym saw two balls where there should have been one.

His parents took him to an eye doctor, who found nothing wrong with his eyes and prescribed rest. But Plym’s double vision worsened, and he started getting blinding headaches and bouts of nausea. A neurological exam confirmed his parents’ worst fears. A ball of brain tissue the size of an orange was pushing against Plym’s optic nerve. Plym’s neurologist diagnosed a grade-three oligodendroglioma — a late-stage, recurrent brain tumor.

When doctors diagnosed Plym’s first brain tumor, they thought he had about a year and a half left to live. Today, at age fifty-three, Plym is a retired sports-car technician who lives in Asheville, North Carolina. He has survived eleven relapses of his brain tumor, and he’s determined to fight his cancer to the death.

There’s promise in brain cancer research to slow the march of the disease one day. Until then, survivors pin much of their hope on the will to live.

“When I was young,” Plym says, “I had a big space between my teeth, and I was conscious of it. We thought about getting braces to get that straightened out, but the doctors said that I wouldn’t live long enough to have the braces off. Now, in my fortieth year of being a brain tumor survivor, I’m glad I went and got those braces. When I do die, I’ll die with a smile on my face.”

George is world known as a long-term brain tumor survivor, being diagnosed in 1967 with an astrocytoma. He went on to have 11 more brain tumors in over 40 years, along with two other cancers.

He is the founder president of WNC Brain Tumor Support in Asheville, North Carolina and is also a member of the Wake Forest University Comprehensive Cancer Center Regional Advisory Board Winston-Salem, North Carolina and the WNC Brain Tumor Support advisory board.. You can view his website which is which is very detailed from diagnosis to is current condition.  www.wncbraintumorsurvivor.webs.com                             -------------------------------------------------------------------------------