Veteran beats odds against stage 4 brain cancer

Imagine being awake while surgeons operate on your brain for one Arizona veteran battling an aggressive form of brain cancer. It's part of a plan to give him something he was once told he had very little time of very little of time. Well, now three and a half years post diagnosis, doctors are using cutting edge science and his own cancer cells in the fight for his future. Kyle Fisher is a fighter, a veteran, who joined the Air Force after 9-11 in 2001. And it was just horrendous event. And just God just changed my heart and broke my heart for all these people. He worked on surveillance aircraft and after a few years separated from service in search of a quiet life. But there was an even greater personal challenge on the road ahead. In February of 2023, Kyle lost vision in one of his eyes. He started getting frequent I guess they were migraines, but I was able to sleep for the most part. There was a couple of nights I couldn't sleep. He had just started a new company, figured it was stress, but his symptoms got worse. Eight seizures, two life flights and a broken jaw. My feet have a little neuropathy in them. Yeah. So basically, it's like your foot falling asleep and just never waking up. Sometimes I lose a word and it takes a moment for that to come or somebody has to help me with it. He went to Mayo Clinic and that's where he got the news. You have a major mass in your brain. You have no cerebral spinal fluid. Like, we don't even understand how you just came in here. And you basically had a week to live if you didn't walk in the doors today. They did brain surgery that night, diagnosed him with brain cancer, stage four, and gave him six to 12 months to live. Doctors recommended chemotherapy and radiation, but Kyle turned it down. I sat there and I prayed about it and I was like. You know, I don't want the last six to 12 months of my life, you know, being that kind of quality where you're sick and you're going through all that. Kyle is a man of faith. He looks to God for guidance. A church friend helped him find a new care team. Doctors Joseph Georges and Peter Nakaji are two Arizona neurosurgeons helping to advance the science, working on the latest treatments for brain cancer, including dendritic cell therapy. In basic terms, a cancer vaccine, a personalized treatment that uses a patient's own immune cells to help the body recognize and destroy cancer. We really go out to all the resources in the world. And look to say, what could we possibly offer, even if it's not here, even if it's not with us? What can we offer that's available right now? Because that's the battle he's fighting, and that's the battle we want to fight with him. These doctors looked at his scans. They decided to operate and do things a little differently. Dr. Nakashi, and he was like, you're right. He was like, I wouldn't do brain surgery with you again asleep. He was like, but awake. I would do, and I've had a feeling that we can get a lot more of this tumor out. You heard that right. Brain surgery. Awake. Kyle was excited to get started. You good there? Me? Yep. Are you good? We're good. We're good. All right. Kyle's tumor is near the part of the brain that controls speech. So here he is talking during surgery to make sure they get as much of the tumor as possible without going too far. Go ahead and count again. One to ten. One. This is where the personalized treatment plan comes in. Kyle has chosen to preserve his tumor cells for dendritic cell therapy through a company called Immunocene. During surgery, his doctors put pieces of the tumor inside a special kit. Those samples will be preserved for up to two years in the hopes of creating a unique vaccine to fight his cancer. With glioblastoma, historically, we've measured how people do in months or years. I'm really hoping with Kyle that we can measure this in decades and hopefully provide him a very long productive life. It's been three and a half years since he was first diagnosed and Kyle has already beaten the odds. While he waits for this new cancer killer to be created in a lab, he plans to use this time to live as normally as possible. He hopes his story will inspire people to look beyond conventional treatment for cancer and trust in a higher power. I want to have children with my wife and, you know, just live peacefully out in the country with just kind of everything behind me. You have such a good outlook about this whole thing. It's faith. Yeah, it's not me. It's God in me. You saw the video of the surgery there. The surgery went well. He went home from the hospital the next day. He's still healing and he's getting targeted radiation therapy. And soon the plan is he'll travel to Mexico for this immunotherapy treatment. And there are many clinical trials that are underway right now looking at dendritic cell therapy. This is all happening. So to learn more about this and how, you know, maybe you need this or someone in your family does to learn more More about Immunocene, you can visit Fox 10. and click on this story.