Four weeks. That is how long it took glioblastoma to kill Tyler Morton, an artist aged 21 who lived in Bedford. His earache began in January and he was dead by March 25.
The earache came in January. Then his face went numb on the left and walking became hard. Doctors at the hospital diagnosed an ear complaint and sent him home on antibiotics. They did nothing. He began vomiting and lost function down his entire left side.
His sister Ella, 19, works as a mechanic. She said a CT scan in those days “didn’t show anything untoward.” Doctors put the problem down to vertigo and prescribed anti-sickness medication. “It didn’t help at all,” she said.
Two seizures, then a lesion
Ella took him back. They had barely arrived when he had two seizures. “He was physically disabled by this point and could barely talk,” she said.
Five days after the first scan, a second CT showed a lesion on his brain. A follow-up scan came a week later, a biopsy the next day, and a week after that the family heard the diagnosis: grade 4 glioblastoma, an aggressive brain cancer with no known cure. By then Tyler was too ill for any treatment. His body, doctors said, would not have coped with it.
“Three weeks earlier, he was walking and talking, and now he couldn’t do anything himself,” Ella said. “He was just a body at that point. Tyler was discharged from hospital to basically pass away at home.”
The two of them had lived with their grandmother and, as Ella put it, were inseparable. She described her brother as funny and kind, the person she went to for anything.
What eats at her is the timing. “If they had found it sooner, he probably would have had the chance to have chemotherapy,” she said. “At least that would have felt like we tried.”
The numbers behind the case
Glioblastoma is diagnosed in roughly 3,200 people across Britain every year. Only one third live beyond 12 months, and average survival runs between 12 and 18 months.
Brain Tumour Research, the charity Ella is now working with during Glioblastoma Awareness Week, says no other cancer kills as many children and adults below the age of 40. Yet just 1% of national cancer research spending has gone to them since records began in 2002.
Dr Karen Noble, who directs research and policy there, called Tyler’s story “the devastating reality faced by so many families across the UK.” She wants more government investment, more clinical trials with wider access to them, and fairer access to whole genome sequencing, which could point patients toward new treatments.
Ella has put her own effort in as well. In May she completed a 200-kilometer fundraising challenge for the charity.
Sources
- Man, 21, died from brain tumor just four weeks after doctors misdiagnosed him with ear infection (Unilad)
- Tyler, 21, dead from brain tumour weeks after being told he had ear infection (Stoke Sentinel)
