Michael Strahan's Daughter Isabella, 19, Says Freezing Her Eggs 'Hurt So Bad' After Brain Tumor Surgery
- Oops!Something went wrong.Please try again later.
On the second installment of her YouTube series, the student and model says the procedure was "rough" but necessary before starting chemo and radiation for a brain tumor
Isabella Strahan/YouTube
Isabella Strahan with Kalya Quick and her twin sister Sophia, who joined her second vlog post.Michael Strahan's daughter, Isabella Strahan, shared that freezing her eggs before undergoing treatment for a brain tumor at the base of her skull was "rough" but necessary.
"Since chemo and radiation can affect my fertility, my first step was egg freezing," the 19-year-old student and model revealed in the second installment of her YouTube series, where she's sharing her health journey after having emergency surgery last October to remove a large medulloblastoma — a type of malignant tumor — in her cerebellum.
"That was not fun for me. At all," Isabella said while sitting on a couch with her twin sister Sophia and her father's girlfriend, Kayla Quick.
"You hated the shots," Quick added, referring to the hormone shots that are administered in the abdomen before the procedure, where eggs are retrieved from the ovaries.
"I am not a big needle person ... I've gotten used to my blood and IVs, but shots?" She winced. "That was rough."
Isabella explained that she had to get three shots in her stomach every day for a week that "hurt so bad" right before undergoing the retrieval procedure — which took place on Thanksgiving Day, right near the start of the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade.
"It was like a CIA operation, getting there," Quick said jokingly, adding that the family had a big Thanksgiving dinner together after Isabella's procedure.
"This was a good time. I still had hair. I loved that," Isabella said, sharing that two weeks later, she decided to shave her head because radiation made her hair so thin it was "worse than probably not having hair."
"It starts to thin and just kind of fall out. I couldn't even look at myself," Isabella revealed, adding that she had never really cut her hair before deciding to shave it off in the middle of the night.
"It was like 4 AM. This was like, midlife crisis," said Isabella, who shaved it off while her sister Sophia joined her on FaceTime.
Isabella Strahan/YouTube
Isabella Strahan (center) with Kayla Quick (left) and twin sister Sophia.The teen will start chemotherapy at Duke Children's Hospital & Health Center in Durham, North Carolina, next month. She's also donating donating all financial proceeds from her vlog to The Preston Robert Tisch Brain Tumor Center at Duke University.
In her first vlog, Isabella explained that she first began experiencing symptoms of her brain tumor last September, right when she started her freshman year at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.
“August I felt perfectly normal. The end of September, I had headaches, I was dizzy,” she said. “The biggest one is I couldn’t walk in a straight line. That’s why I thought I had vertigo. And then I would also wake up very nauseous and have to throw up most days.”
Related: All About Michael Strahan's Twins, Isabella and Sophia Strahan
Isabella ultimately visited Cedars-Sinai for a full MRI. While there, doctors discovered she had developed a fast-growing tumor in the back of her brain. It measured 4 centimeters — larger than a golf ball — and she would need emergency surgery to remove it.
"I literally think that in a lot of ways, I'm the luckiest man in the world because I've got an amazing daughter,” her father Michael Strahan 52, told his fellow Good Morning America co-anchor Robin Roberts on the show.
He joined his daughter for the start of her second vlog, teasing her when she didn't start talking at the start of the videos.
"It doesn't matter how many takes, you've got to talk during the takes!" he said, prompting her to giggle.
Isabella and Sophia are the youngest of Strahan's four kids. The former NFL star has two older children — Tanita, 32, and Michael Jr., 29 — with his first wife Wanda Hutchins, and the twins with second wife, Jean Muggli.
“I just hope anyone who sees this knows that there is a light at the end of the tunnel and that things will get better because every day is another day closer to getting better and closer to feeling better,” Isabella said. “Progress takes a lot of time… try to see the positive things.”
For more People news, make sure to sign up for our newsletter!
Read the original article on People.
