Matt Andrews of Heyworth had been a school principal for the better part of two decades when he began experiencing what his wife Sarah described as coordination issues and constant headaches in fall 2021.
Several MRI scans later, doctors found a mass in his brain. They surgically removed the mass before pathology reports determined it was a rare form of medulloblastoma, a brain cancer that begins growing in the cerebellum (bottom of the brain) and impairs the patient’s motor skills and cognition. It’s responsible for 20% of childhood brain tumors, but only 1% of malignant tumors in adults.
“He was in the ICU recovering from his surgery for seven weeks,” Sarah said. “From there he went up north to a rehab facility called Marianjoy (in Wheaton) as he was preparing for proton radiation at Northwestern in the Chicago area where he had six weeks of five times a week of radiation to his cerebellum in his brain, and when that was over, he came home and began chemotherapy.”
Matt was already a rare case with his diagnosis of medulloblastoma as an adult, but what made it even more rare was his condition post radiation.
“What we’ll see with radiation injury, which is a rare side effect of radiation, but it does happen ... It basically damages the vasculature within your brain, so making parts of your brain not get the oxygen it needs and therefore you’ll see changes in functionality,” said Debbie Wietfeldt, Matt’s nurse practitioner from the Center for Wound Healing and Hyperbaric Medicine at Carle BroMenn Medical Center.
Unorthodox use of a treatment
For such an uncommon case, Wietfeldt figured an uncommon treatment may be in order.
Hyperbaric oxygen therapy (HBOT) puts the patient in a room of pressurized oxygen to stimulate the healing of damaged cells and tissues. Often used as wound care, radiation injury is an unorthodox use of the treatment.
Unorthodox medical treatments can be difficult to pitch to insurance providers, especially when the treatment is costly. Wietfeldt worked with the Illinois Department of Insurance to get Andrews’ treatment covered.
“We had essentially maximized every other option that would have been by the book,” Wietfeldt said. “So, this was considered to be his best option as an adjunctive therapy... what the Department of Insurance was able to do was actually paint a broader picture and enable them to get covered for the additional treatments up to 60.”
Sixty treatments later, Matt’s quality of life had improved significantly. While there are still challenges ahead, the difference the HBOT treatment has made is palpable for him.
“I just felt better,” Matt said. “It’s like the light switched on. We're working on the walking now, but other than that my cognition was better, retention was good and I just felt better.”
Matt is not the only one to notice the impact the treatment has had. Wietfeldt saw improvements at every stage of the process.
“At treatment five was when I started to see this personality start to come,” Wietfeldt said. “So with hyperbaric, you don’t typically tend to see new blood vessel growth… until [at] the earliest treatment (number 10 to 14) ... so to see Matt making some of those changes already at treatment five to ten was pretty remarkable.”
Matt regained a lot cognitive and motor skills thanks to HBOT, but one of the more meaningful wins was the return of Matt’s personality.
“Seeing him now versus the first time I saw him is truly amazing,” Wietfeldt said. “I think the thing for me that I started to notice was that he was making jokes, and I got to know him as a sense of humor.”
The effects of Matt’s improvement are not limited to him and his physicians. The results of his treatment have launched hyperbaric oxygen therapy into new spaces, allowing its bandwidth of treatment options to expand, and prospective patients to breathe again.
“We were in Chicago in March for Matt’s MRI and appointment with his neurooncologist, and he said that Matt’s case had been so successful they’d started offering this suggestion to their patients,” Sarah said. “I mean that’s a brain cancer office. They see many, many patients.”
From rare forms of cancer to groundbreaking treatment options, Matt’s story demonstrates how the future of medicine is more than capable of defying the odds.
