Ice skating legend and television commentator Scott Hamilton has battled - and defeated - cancer twice. But now in the middle of another battle against a pituitary tumor in his brain, Hamilton has decided against treatment. "When they gave me the diagnosis, they said, it's back," he recently told "PEOPLE." "And so they brought in this guy, a really young, talented surgeon, and he said, 'We could do the surgery again. It'd be complicated, but we've got really talented people here that we could bring in, and I know we could pull it off if that's an option for you.'"
But for now, surgery is not an option for Hamilton. He'd already gone through surgery twice, first when he was diagnosed with brain cancer in 2004, and then again when it returned in 2010. The second time around proved to be extremely complicated, resulting in nine different surgeries after an artery in his brain was nicked. Hamilton knew he didn't want to go through a similar ordeal.
He decided to go home and regain his strength as best he could. "All I felt was just, don't worry about this. Just go home and get strong," he says. "They go, 'Well, what do you want to do?' And I said, 'I think I'm going to go home and get strong.'"
The strategy worked - for a while. "It's been remarkable," he says. "I went back to the scan three months later and they said, it hasn't grown. I go back three months later and they go, it shrank 45%. I said to my surgeon, 'Can you explain this?' And he said, 'God.' I went back in, and it shrunk 25% again." However, the next time he returned to get it checked, the news wasn't as positive, and the tumor was making a resurgence. At this point, he made the decision to not go through treatments - at least for now. "In my spirit, in my inner being, I realized, I'm totally at peace with not even looking at it again unless I become symptomatic," he says. And Hamilton admits that he may change his mind. "I'm mostly trying to be in the moment and taking all the information and do the right thing when the time comes."
Source: People