>> Hey, I'm JC and this is my wife Luann.
[ Music ]
[ Laughter ]
I was diagnosed in 1997 with an anaplastic astrocytoma in the left front lobe,
and before we actually discovered it, for a few weeks I was having, I call them "episodes",
and it would be to where I would want to do something, but my body just wouldn't do it.
I would lock up and I would -- I was -- I'm a recording engineer, so I would hit the --
you go to hit the tape deck, stop button, and my hand would just kind of hover there
and I'm going "You need to do this," and I knew something was wrong.
And so then I finally was able to see just a general practitioner and she was going
to refer me to -- there was a Friday I was going to go to this neurologist, and the night before
that doctor's appointment, I had a seizure in the middle of the night
and that's when we knew something was up.
>> After the seizure, when you're in the hospital and a lot of very smart,
very busy people start to become very concerned, it kind of all fell apart from there.
But eventually we got on a better path and we're happy to be this far down the road.
>> Mm-hm, yeah.
>> So I think at first we tried to find the best help we could from --
just starting from the ER and got a lot of different opinions from different people and,
thankfully, eventually found at Emory -- Dr. Gilbert and Terri were there,
and we really found out that finding a neuro-oncologist is pretty important
and was very helpful in our journey.
And after that, or I think as we found them, JC also had surgery.
He ended up having surgery at NIH, and then we came back to Atlanta and did a clinical trial
for temozolomide with Dr. Gilbert at Emory, and then after that, radiation?
>> Mm-hm.
>> Six weeks?
>> Whatever it --
>> Of radiation.
So all in all, I would say that was about a year, probably about a year of active treatment.
>> Yeah. Luann bore the brunt of all this initial .
. .
>> Research?
>> Yeah. So she's the one that had all the people coming out of the woodwork saying, "Oh,
did you see this article in Time?"
or "Did you see this?"
And this sounds bad, but I had the easy road because I just had to go to surgery.
She's the one that had to be in the waiting room with, you know, parents and relatives,
and I got to avoid all of the reality and I just got to go through treatment.
She's the one that had to deal with the nuts and bolts of navigating this, you know,
what is good information and what is just, you know, not good.
Aside from still being an idiot, I mean, I thankfully have no long-term effects, I think.
Do I?
>> I would say he still has trouble talking sometimes,
like finding the right words on occasion.
He does get migraines every once in a while, which may be completely unrelated.
I would say that a life-changing diagnosis like this is not what you would hope for,
but if and when it happens, it's an opportunity to evaluate your life
and to avoid living the unexamined life, and when you do examine your life,
you know, get your house in order.
It's your spiritual life, your relationships, you know, it's an opportunity to make the most
of whatever you have left, whether you survive for 20, 30, 40,
50 years or whether you don't have that long.
It's just a beautiful but tragic opportunity to really be intentional about how you choose
to live your life and how you choose to treat the people around you
and then how you use whatever you have, whatever you've got left.
>> Yeah, anytime I share one-on-one my story, I say .
. .
[ Music ]
>> What do you want to say?
Whisper it to me right here.
>> It's just the biggest blessing, like now you know what's important.
>> Yeah.
>> U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, National Institutes of Health,
National Cancer Institute, cancer.gov, 1-800-4-CANCER, produced August 2021.