Isabella Strahan shares update following 2nd brain surgery
"Good Morning America" co-anchor Michael Strahan's daughter Isabella Strahan is sharing a health update after recently undergoing a second brain surgery amid her cancer battle.
In a new vlog shared Wednesday, the 19-year-old revealed she was getting a follow-up operation to reassess the area in her skull where surgeons had operated previously. Strahan announced back in January that she had been diagnosed in October with medulloblastoma, a type of brain tumor, and received an emergency craniotomy and brain surgery shortly thereafter.
"I'm going to have another craniotomy, which is the cutting open [of] my scar from my first surgery, my first craniotomy, and then cleaning it, and then maybe taking my bone out, maybe not, maybe putting a plate in there," Strahan said from her hospital bed ahead of her second surgery.
A craniotomy is a procedure where surgeons make a small hole in the skull or remove a piece of skull bone to remove a brain tumor or treat other brain conditions, according to the National Cancer Institute.
Strahan said doctors hoped the craniotomy would help relieve unexpected fevers she had previously opened up about in an earlier vlog and which required her to visit the emergency room twice.
She said she felt "more nervous" before surgery this time around, and after the procedure, she said she was in "so much pain" and wasn't feeling her best.
"My face is extremely puffy and this sucks. I was in so much pain earlier. I was like, screaming," she said.
"It's not fun but I'm just super glad I can still walk and talk and they didn't like, touch my brain, because doing that again … would be really, really rough," she added.
Strahan said in addition to cleaning her skull scar area, surgeons also added a titanium plate to replace a bone area that was previously cut out during a previous craniotomy.
She also said due to this second brain surgery, she had to postpone her ongoing chemotherapy treatment for her brain tumor, known as medulloblastoma, by a week.
"Because of this, I pushed my chemo back a week, which I think is needed because I don't know, it'd be horrible to do chemo and then I wouldn't be able to heal from this because my white blood cells would be low again," Strahan said.
"Hopefully, I will get to go home soon after I heal from this. I don't feel my best but I wanted to give a vlog update," she added.
Since revealing in January that she had been diagnosed with medulloblastoma, Strahan has been documenting her cancer journey on her YouTube channel, which benefits Duke University's Preston Robert Tisch Brain Tumor Center, where she has been receiving treatment.
"I hope to just kind of be a voice, and be [someone] who people, maybe [those who] are going through chemotherapy or radiation, can look at," Strahan said at the time of her motivation to share online.
