An Arizona mother who noticed a strange glow in her baby boy’s eye in pictures has helped doctors save him from a rare cancer, she said Thursday.
Andrea Temarantz started seeing a glint in her son Ryder’s left eye in the camera flash of her cell phone when Ryder was three months old. She spoke with the Daily News after her family returned to their Scottsdale home from his treatment for retinoblastoma at New York’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center.
“He’s only had one treatment but you would never know there was anything going on,” Temarantz said, recalling the first time she saw the glow that turned out to be a cancerous tumor. “I kind of chalked it up to my cell phone just being a crummy phone. It very well could have gotten so much bigger.”
Doctors in Arizona gave Temarantz and her husband Joseph, who also have a 3-year-old son named Joe, two choices after they diagnosed his cancer at his four-month checkup, her family has written on a blog and fundraiser site titled “Ryderstrong.com.”
The doctors could either remove the eye or give little Ryder, who has Down syndrome, intravenous chemotherapy. The latter treatment would have exposed the boy to a greater risk of developing another cancer. Then the staff at the Phoenix-based hospital presented another option: a different treatment practiced at the oldest and largest private cancer center.
FundRazrAndrea Temarantz wondered last month why her baby boy Ryder had this glow in his eye in most pictures she took of him. It turned out he had a rare cancer called retinoblastoma.
Ryder and his family traveled to New York last week for his first intra-arterial chemotherapy session. Dr. David Abramson, the chief of MSK’s ophthalmic oncology service, described how doctors administer “less than a teaspoon of chemotherapy” through the treatment he helped develop ten years ago.
Abramson treats the affected blood vessel behind the baby’s eye through a six-foot-long catheter “as thin as angel hair pasta” entering through the infant’s groin. The children keep their eyes and go home with one Band-Aid after each monthly session over a roughly three-month span. The process cures 99% of patients, and MSK has employed it on 1,600 children – including the daughter of New York Knicks coach Derek Fisher.
“Almost all of these children were scheduled to have those eyes removed somewhere,” Abramson said. “We don’t have one child who has died from this cancer.”
Abramson noted that all children who haven’t been treated will die and as many as 50% of children with the cancer worldwide end up dying from it. Most kids who have retinoblastoma are diagnosed before they turn 5 and there are about 350 new cases per year in America, according to the hospital.
FundRazrThis picture shows Ryder at Phoenix Children’s Hospital, where medical staff first mentioned a different treatment available at New York’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center.
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FundRazr
These photos show the cancerous tumor in Ryder’s left eye.
Ryder in a crib at Phoenix Children’s Hospital, where a doctor first mentioned a different treatment available at New York’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. The photo at right shows the cancerous tumor in Ryder’s left eye.
“This is a cancer that is actually usually detected by parents and not by physicians,” he said. “It’s a very nasty cancer that is curable and treatable.”
Temarantz, 36, is now hoping word spreads to other parents whose children may have retinoblastoma, she said. The “glow” she saw in Ryder’s eye is indicative of up to 16 different diseases, according to a child health organization called “Know the Glow.”
“We just hope for people to see how easy it would be to recognize this,” Temarantz said. “My husband has always thought I was ‘crazy picture mom,’ but look at us now. So early detection is the main thing.”
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