Imagine being 5 again. Now imagine being 5 and being told you have Medulloblastoma, a type of brain cancer.
Jonathan Eissler, now 29 and an Eastern Michigan University student, was diagnosed with a Medulloblastoma tumor at age 5. He was just starting first grade.
“I only remember bits and pieces of that time, maybe it was because I was so young, or maybe it was because it was such a bad experience I just repressed the memories,” he said.
Eissler does remember he had to repeat first grade because he was too sick to complete it the first time.
According to the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center website, Medulloblastoma is a primitive neuroectodermal tumor. In other words, it is a tumor in the nervous system. It affects the cerebellum as well as other brain structures, and it can also affect the spinal chord. This type of cancer normally affects a child by the time he or she is 10. The survival rate is 60-80 percent, according to St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, Medulloblastoma accounts for about 20 percent of childhood brain tumors.
Due to the cancer, Eissler ended up in a coma. He knows he woke up from the coma on Christmas day in 1985. He doesn’t remember how he felt when he woke up, how long it lasted, or even going into the coma. As a child, he was in the hospital so much, he grew close with some of the nurses.
Eissler regrets not staying in contact with some of them.
He remembers while staying at the Children’s Hospital of Milwaukee, a nurse came to draw blood and he got scared, because of all of the previous times he had been poked at and prodded. He asked the nurse to wait for his mother to get there, so she could be there to hold his hand.
Eissler’s mother was with him through his fight with cancer every step of the way. She stopped working for a period of time to stay by his side, he said. Even to this day, talking about Eissler’s fight with cancer is too hard for her. He said she doesn’t like to think about it.
“Guys are rough, and want to wrestle each other, they play mean jokes on each other, they probably aren’t intentionally being mean, but growing up I was always surrounded by girls,” Eissler said.
He had to start injecting himself with growth hormones in eighth grade, until his sophomore year of high school. The doctors were afraid he would stay 4-feet-9 inches tall before his growth platelets closed up.
Now, he is 5-feet-1 and weighs 145. His short stature was brought on by the radiation treatments that he endured as a child.
“The doctors didn’t want me to play in gym because of the growth hormones, but when I did, I was always on the girls’ teams, because they didn’t play as hard as the guys did,” Eissler said.
The doctors got rid of the cancer with radiation treatments, and then they surgically removed the cancer. Eissler struggles with speech and comprehension because of the cancer. If there is a lot going on around Eissler while he is talking to someone, it takes him a little bit longer to understand exactly what is being said.
He hears the words, but his brain does not grasp the concept right away. This has been a problem for him in work situations. Eissler delivers pizzas, and he also works at a car dealership as a Technical and Sanitation Engineer. Sometimes he will be given instructions, but those instructions won’t click right away, Eissler said.
When Eissler was in third grade, he was having a really hard time grasping long division. When he came to EMU, he still had math problems, so he went to the Math Lab and took advantage of the resources provided by the Students with Disabilities Office. Because of his efforts, Eissler was able to tutored in classes he found difficult.
“I am not always the quickest to catch on to things, sometimes my roommates crack jokes and I don’t understand them until they explain them to me,” Eissler said.
His last girlfriend, whom he was with for four years, cheated on him, but he just didn’t catch on, despite what he said were obvious warning signs.
EMU