Fisher Is a Father First, and a Jazz Player Later

The intra-arterial chemotherapy mentioned here seems like it could be a very promising way of treating retinoblastoma...

OAKLAND, Calif., May 10 — Derek Fisher had 30 minutes Tuesday morning to decide whether to remove his daughter’s left eye.
Fisher, a point guard for the Utah Jazz, sat in an office at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York, across from Dr. David Abramson and Dr. Pierre Gobin, asking them how to cure the cancer that had formed in his baby girl’s retina.

“He really had three choices,” Abramson said. “Remove the eye, remove the eye or remove the eye.”

Last week in Salt Lake City, an advanced case of retinoblastoma, a cancerous tumor of the retina found in about 300 children a year, was diagnosed in Fisher’s 10-month-old daughter, Tatum. Removing the eye is the most common way to remove the tumor.

There was one other option, but it seemed too risky. Last year, Abramson and Gobin developed a procedure called intra-arterial chemotherapy, which allows them to treat the disease without removing an eye.