MIAMI -- Mike Hugo, a 37-year-old Wellington, Florida, resident, has two young daughters, a wife, and a rare form of brain cancer.
Hugo spends his days in South Florida writing milestone birthday cards to his daughters, recording a song for their weddings, and benefiting from advancements in medical technology that give him a better quality of life and potentially longer to live.
Although Hugo’s cancer is aggressive, he wants to defeat the odds.
A medical device sales manager, Hugo had just left a work meeting in April 2022 when he had a seizure while driving home and crashed his car. At the hospital, scans revealed a brain tumor.
Within days, the young father had surgery to remove the tumor by University of Miami doctors who he knew through his job and trusted to keep the side effects to a minimum. “I wanted to be myself to the best of my ability when I woke up,” Hugo said.
Although the surgeons removed Hugo’s tumor successfully, he was diagnosed with stage 4 glioblastoma, a fast growing, aggressive form of brain cancer. While the disease can affect people any age, glioblastoma is more common in older adults. The average age of diagnosis is 64.
“It’s very rare to get it so young,” Hugo said.
The average glioblastoma survival time is 12 to 18 months — only 25% of patients survive more than one year, and only 5% of patients survive more than five years. About 12,000 people a year in the United States are diagnosed with the disease.
Hugo wants to increase his odds.
Three weeks after Hugo’s surgery, the tumor grew back, although much smaller and in the area where he was having radiation. Currently, the young father is undergoing chemotherapy.
“It’s a terrible diagnosis,” Hugo said as he prepared for another round of chemo. “But we are blessed to be in the forefront of all this technology. Part of it is my mental attitude and part is we are getting the best treatment there is.”
More time with the girls
Hugo and his wife Vanessa have been married for more than a decade. Their two girls are 6 and 7 years old. The Wellington father said he and Vanessa pour over data from clinical studies, research new technology and treatments, and investigate every option to give him more time. University of Florida researchers are studying whether a new class of drugs could be effective.
“Every minute that we’re not with our kids or doing work we are focusing on ‘How do I get the best treatment possible,’” he said.
Hugo has made it publicly known that he wants to dance with his daughters at their weddings, even if he is not physically there. He shared a video on Facebook where he spoke about his diagnosis and his wish for his daughters, Bridget and Brooke. He wish is to make an appearance at their weddings via video singing a duet with country music star Tim McGraw to “My Little Girl.”
In late February, McGraw invited Hugo and family to Nashville. McGraw has been an advocate for brain-related research after his father, baseball pitcher Tug McGraw, died of glioblastoma in 2004. Together they recorded a duet and made a video of Hugo and his daughters dancing in a circle at the Grand Ole Opry in a tuxedo and wedding dresses.
“Mike is saving the videos for his daughters’ future weddings ... what a special thing to be a part of,” McGraw wrote on Instagram.
Innovative treatment
After Hugo’s seizure, neurosurgeons at University of Miami used new digital software called Quicktome to visualize Hugo’s brain in detail. The software allowed them to see precisely how the tumor in Hugo’s right temporal lobe had distorted his brain function and remove it without damaging the connections that control emotion, memory or decision-making. Quicktome had gained Food and Drug Administration approval only nine months before Hugo’s diagnosis, and University of Miami is one of the first medical universities in the country to use it on patients.
“When we do these surgeries, it’s this balance between trying to remove as much of the tumor as we can and preserving the functionality of the brain and these connections,” said Dr. Michael E. Ivan, a neurosurgeon and scientist at the University of Miami Miller School Of Medicine who specializes in complex brain tumors.
Ivan said neurosurgeons have learned over time how to protect someone’s motor and speech functions during brain surgery. However, because the makeup of everyone’s brain is different, doctors have found it tricky to preserve someone’s higher-order functions such as comprehension of space and time, facial recognition and memory. That’s why this software is a major advancement.
“The more information we can get about how the brain is connected before we go into it, the more we can know where the tumor is and tailor how we do the surgery to know where those functions may be and protect them,” Ivan said. “We used to just have the structures of where the tumor was and where the surface of the brain was, but now we actually have an additional outline of the connections around the tumor.”
The university has a clinical trial underway to learn how to optimize the Quicktome software to get the best results for brain tumor patients to improve their quality of life.
Over time, Ivan said, neurosurgeons will be able to learn where connections within the brain lead and their purposes, allowing doctors to plot tumor removals in advance for better brain function after surgery.
Hugo also has found another way to use technology to give him more time with his family. He wears an FDA-approved medical device to treat glioblastoma on his head to slow the growth and spread of his brain tumor. The device, called Optune, uses electric fields to stop cancer cell division. In clinical trials, patients who wore Optune more than 90% of the time extended their lives. They had a median survival of about 25 months and a five-year survival of 29%. So far, Hugo’s tumor has remained small.
“Obviously I’m motivated to live a long time,” he said. “I sleep with it ... every two to three hours I swap out the batteries. It’s working well for now and we just keep hoping that this blessing keeps on going.”
