Boy who dubbed tumour ‘Frank’ now cancer-free

A NINE-YEAR-OLD boy who nicknamed his brain tumour “Frank” and whose mother launched an online auction to help pay for his medical bills is now cancer-free, his mother said yesterday.

“Frank is dead!” an elated Tiffini Dingman-Grover said by telephone from her Sterling home as the family prepared to head to a press conference in Washington DC.

David Dingman-Grover had most of his tumour removed on February 2 at the Skull Base Institute at Cedars-Sinai Medical Centre in Los Angeles. The family learned the results of a biopsy on the tumour at midnight Monday. The family was crowded around the phone waiting for the call from David’s surgeon, his mother said.

“(David) is so mellow - he’s so easygoing. He was just like, ‘Really? Great! Cool!’” Ms Dingman-Grover said of her son’s reaction to the good news. “It’s like, ‘Is that all?’ He said, ‘Did you ever think it wouldn’t be gone?’”

David was diagnosed in May 2003 with a grapefruit-sized malignant brain tumour called a rhabdomyosarcoma, which was causing blindness and headaches.

He nicknamed it “Frank” after Frankenstein, who scared him until he dressed up as the monster for Halloween.

The size and location of the tumour initially made it impossible for doctors to remove, his mother said. Chemotherapy shrank it to the size of an apricot, but David needed a specialised biopsy to determine whether the tumour was still cancerous.

To help pay for the pricey procedure, David’s mother auctioned off a bumper sticker on eBay that read “Frank Must Die.” Donations poured in from across the world and, after hearing about the family’s struggle, the surgeon offered to perform the biopsy for free.

“It’s been such a tremendous experience,” Ms Dingman-Grover said.