Kyle Malcott
Kyle Malcott is 13 years old and loves all sports, soccer being his favorite to play, as well as basketball and baseball. He loves to watch the New York Yankees, SU Orangemen, NY Knicks and NY Giants for football.
In November of 2013, Kyle started having headaches, nausea and vomiting. He was playing for the school basketball team and he came home saying he had a headache and went to bed. This went on for a few days so we took him to our regular doctor, who said it was a virus. A week later Kyle still wasn’t feeling right and went to the eye doctor to see if his vision was the cause. The doctor at Vision Works in Fulton looked into his eyes several times after the eye exam, saw pressure behind Kyle’s eyes and said, “If it were my child I would take him to the Upstate ER.”
“If it were my child I would take him to the Upstate ER”
After eight hours in the ER at Upstate, a CT scan showed a mass on Kyle’s brain. Never in our wildest dreams did we expect what was ahead of us, our whole world tipped upside down. He was admitted to Golisano Children’s Hospital where he underwent 3 surgeries, a biopsy of the tumor and a permanent shunt. We left the hospital 10 days later with no results of the biopsy yet.
On December 12, we found ourselves receiving news we did not want to hear – it was pineal parenchymal, a cancerous tumor. As of mid March 2014, he has finished with six weeks of chemo and radiation. Kyle will have a six week break, then return to Upstate for a six rounds of chemo. Everyone at the Cancer Center has been awesome in getting us through this nightmare. We are praying for the best!
“Laughing was the thing that got me through everything, and that’s what I want to do for everyone else now.”
An Important Update from Kyle
I was just about to turn 13 in December 2013 when I was diagnosed with a golf ball-sized tumor in the middle of my brain (Pineal Blastoma). I went through chemo and radiation for most of 2014. Fully 100% cancer free as of June 2016.
I’m still dealing with side effects, like nerve damage in my right arm from radiation. I’m 21 now. The hardest part of everything I went through was having sports taken away Finally, after having double hip replacement (because my hip joints corroded from steroid treatment) in 2020 so I can walk straight again, I’ve got my athletics back under me, and play basketball every day the weather permits!
This is my first butterfly run walking normally again. I was pursuing a career in stand-up comedy and made my official stand-up debut at Comedy at the Carlson in Rochester last September. Laughing was the thing that got me through everything, and that’s what I want to do for everyone else now.
