How Cancer Supercharged Olympic Gold Medalist Scott Hamilton’s Faith
By Movieguide® Contributor
Olympian Scott Hamilton explained how cancer brought him closer to God and lauded the work that his foundation has achieved within the field of cancer research.
“2004 was the first brain tumor. It just ignited my faith, it was one of those things.” Hamilton told Jennifer Hudson. “I told my wife, [and] without skipping a beat, she just took my hands and started to pray, and it was the most powerful — I’ve had a lot of big moments, that was probably the biggest.”
Though that tumor was removed by doctors, it came back six years later and wasn’t as easy to remove. However, after nine surgeries, the brain tumor was fully taken care of, only to return six years later.
“There’s a pattern emerging here,” Hamilton joked. “I came back again, and this time, I just felt like they’re giving me a surgical option and a medical option. All I felt in the back of my head was ‘Get strong.’ That was it. Just ‘Get strong.’ I had no idea what that meant, and they said, ‘Well, what do you want to do, surgery or [the] medical option?’ I go, ‘I’m going to go home, and I’m going to get strong.’ And they go, ‘What does that look like?’ And I said, ‘I have no idea. I’m just feeling this.’”
After a few months of working on getting strong physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually, Hamilton went back to the doctors to see how the brain tumor was progressing.
“I went in for the scan, and they said, ‘You’re going to get good news.’ And I go, ‘What is it?’ They go, ‘It didn’t grow.’ I was like, ‘Okay,’” Hamilton recalled. “I went back again three months later, ‘You’re going to get good news.’ ‘What’s that?’ ‘It shrunk 45%.’ And I said to the surgeon, I go, ‘Can you explain that?’ And he goes, ‘God.’ Good enough for me.
“And then it shrunk again, then it grew, and then it grew, and it shrunk, and it grew, and then Covid happened, and I got tired of fighting the medical system, so I just said, you know what, this thing doesn’t exist. It’s gone,” he continued.
Five years later, the brain tumor has yet to be a problem. Now, Hamilton is supporting research into natural ways to fight cancer rather than fighting the disease with drugs.
“Right now, I’m just trying to really be productive and be as busy as I can, living as totally normal a life as I can. Be a good citizen and fund cancer research,” he said of living with the tumor.
“I started a foundation called the Cancer Alliance for Research Education Survivorship, and it’s amazing. We’ve been able to fund research. We created a mentorship program called Fourth Angel where we pair newly diagnosed patients with survivors. We created chemocare.com and now it’s all about research,” Hamilton said.
“Our research is all about funding the future of cancer which is immunotherapy,” he continued. “Our bodies created the cancer, let’s teach our bodies how to detect and destroy it. So all we fund is immunotherapy and it’s really amazing.”
“The Scott Hamilton CARES Foundation is committed to revolutionizing cancer care by funding cutting-edge research that focuses on treating the cancer while sparing the patient from harsh side effects associated with conventional cancer treatments,” the group’s website reads.
Movieguide® previously reported:
Ice skating gold medalist Scott Hamilton is saying no to surgery after discovering his third brain tumor.
The 65-year-old has “gone through surgery twice, first when he was diagnosed with a brain tumor in 2004, and then again when it returned in 2010,” PEOPLE reported.
“Hamilton has had to face his fears many times in life, from learning to skate as a little kid to dealing with the grief of losing his mother to breast cancer in 1977,” PEOPLE said. “He also faced testicular cancer in 1997, from which he successfully recovered after surgery and chemotherapy.”
Hamilton learned of his third tumor in 2016. Unlike with his previous tumors, this time, he didn’t want to treat it.
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