Good News

[David]

'Frank The Tumor' Is Removed


AP


A 9-year-old boy who nicknamed his brain tumor "Frank" ? that's short for Frankenstein ? is celebrating the intruder's departure.

"Frank is now dead and gone and never to return," David Dingman-Grover said Tuesday. He was wearing a black T-shirt that read, "Cancer is not who I am."

Frank the Tumor gained national attention when David's mother created "Frank Must Die" bumper stickers, which the family auctioned on eBay to defray the costs of surgery.

Biopsy results Tuesday showed the tumor was no longer cancerous.

When the boy from Sterling, Va., outside Washington was diagnosed with a grapefruit-sized tumor in 2003, the family was told the size and location in the center of his skull made it difficult ? perhaps impossible ? to remove.

Doctors used chemotherapy and radiation to shrink the tumor to the size of a peach pit. That alleviated the child's headaches and temporary blindness, but doctors still needed to remove the tumor.

Traditional brain surgery, called craniotomy, involves cutting through the patient's face and skull. The parents agreed to the operation, but it never occurred ? too risky. The tumor was surrounded by three arteries responsible for supplying blood flow to the brain.

David's mother used the Internet to find out about an alternative procedure.

Dr. Hrayr Shahinian of the Skull Base Institute in Los Angeles used fiber-optic instruments to remove the tumor through the child's nose in a 1?-hour operation Feb. 2 at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center.

"There were no cuts on his face," Shahinian said.

"David would have most likely died if we had done the surgery the other way," said Tiffani Dingman-Grover. "I'm just so grateful that I have the chance to continue to be David's mother."

David will be 10 on March 1 and said he had no doubts he would see this birthday.

"I knew the Lord would guide me through this," he said. "I'm very happy. I just want to go home and live a normal life again." He will spend the coming months recovering from chemotherapy and radiation which has left his immune system low and his muscles weak.

The surgeon did not charge for the procedure, which normally would cost about $100,000 including hospital fees and anesthesiologists. The family has donated $20,000 they received to a charity to help other children with pediatric cancers.

Asked why he did the surgery for free, the doctor showed reporters a pebble the boy gave him which he now carries in his wallet. On it is the word "courage."

[David]

(CBS/AP) They're calling it a miracle on the mountain.

Returning from a basketball game in southwestern Colorado, a minivan skidded off the road and over a cliff, plunging 400 feet into a ravine.

"We were just going around the corner and we barely started to slide," Joe Sullivan, the driver, says. "We weren't going very fast, and we just sort of got over the edge and there we went."

With bruses on her face, his wife, Linda Sullivan, tells The Early Show co-anchor Julie Chen, "It's just a helpless feeling. You just start falling and you wait until it stops."

Joe Sullivan recalls closing his eyes and yelling he was sorry.

His daughter Tessa remembers hearing her brother screaming very loudly. "I was actually asleep, and that's probably what woke me up first," she says.

The Sullivans' friend, Terry Holman, and his daughter, Stacia, were also in the van when it crashed Saturday. He was in the front seat with Joe Sullivan.

"It doesn't really give you time to think," Terry Holman says. "As we went off the first thing I thought was, we were probably done for."

There was no guard rail and they were too close to the edge. Joe Sullivan says simply, "The road was just not there."

He tells Chen, "After the first roll and you're still alive, I mean you could still feel it, I said, 'You know maybe we're OK.' And then you go again and again. We never stopped. It wouldn't stop, and so I kept thinking we survived every roll - it seemed like."

When the vehicle finally stopped rolling, the occupants were not only still alive, but no one was seriously hurt.

At it's best, Colorado's 11,000 foot Red Mountain pass is treacherous. But on this day it was covered in ice.

Linda Sullivan says, "For just the last couple of miles, they had been snowy roads, maybe even with a little bit of water on top. Prior to that, the road had just been wet."

Skip Garcia was driving behind the minivan and he rounded a corner and noticed the van was gone. Garcia says he saw tire tracks going over the mountainside and when he looked down, he saw the van. He and his wife called for help.

Sam Rushing of Ouray Mountain Rescue responded. He says, "We were expecting the worst, and in my wildest imagination I would have never have expected this scenario. I have been on the team 13 years I have never seen this."

The task then became to get the occupants out of the ravine.

Everyone in the van was able to get out and walk away, with the exception of Linda Sullivan. Rescuers used a sled to pull her up.

"I was pretty dazed," she says. "I think just my arm had been caught. So I think the circulation had been cut off for a little bit, and I was feeling pretty woozy. Actually, my daughter helped me get out of the van, and they all had me sit down and cover me up.

She had to be carried out on a stretcher, but it was a small inconvenience.

"Like God was with us, is what we were thinking." Linda Sullivan says, "We had our seat belts on."

As one rescuer put it: "They must have had an angel watching over them."

The Colorado State Patrol says several things helped the people survive. They were all wearing their seat belts and that kept them from being ejected. And the snow helped to cushion the van and possibly keep it from rolling over multiple times.