TV show highlights real brain tumor treatments

High tech and hope often merge for brain cancer patients

LOS ANGELES, California (CNN) -- Fans of the NBC series "ER" got bad news last night about one of the show's characters, Dr. Mark Green.

The script has Green discovering he has a brain tumor. Not just any brain tumor but a glioblastoma -- or GBM -- arguably one of the most dangerous tumors anywhere in the body.

He is told he probably has only a few months to live and a nearly impossible choice -- fight those odds or give in.

Dr. Mark Morocco, writer and medical adviser for the show, wanted to give ER's millions of viewers a glimpse of what a brain tumor patient goes through. "They'll get some real idea of what the experience is like for the character, for his wife, for his children," he says.

Dr. Green decides to fight. The show has him undergoing brain surgery, while awake, and has him getting wafers full of chemotherapy drugs placed directly in his brain. And he uses a futuristic contraption called a gamma knife.

"We've actually built sort of a hybrid machine that involves parts and bits and pieces of the different kids of gamma knife machines as you may know," Morocco says during a tour of the "ER" set.

All very real therapies for a very fictional television start. But what's it like in real life?

"I think it rings true in the fact that, yes indeed, this guy has probably suffered more than anybody else on that show gets stuck with something nobody experts, and that would indeed be a brain tumor," says brain tumor patient Dr. David Pickrell, a dentist.

Doctors told Pickerell his brain tumor should be 'tackled' right away.

You can't tell by just looking at him, but Pickrell was diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor just a few months ago.

"I was having headaches, nonstop every day for about two weeks," recounts Pickrell. "I thought it was sinus, but there was no bleeding, there was nothing. I was like, ok, this is too weird. And I started not being able to fill out patient's charts."

He realized he needed a doctor. "He called me back and said, 'You've got a brain tumor, you need to pack a bag and come back tomorrow'," Pickrell says.

The first step was open surgery. Pickrell was awakened at times during the procedure to have his abilities tested. Seven weeks of standard radiation therapy followed.

The tumor returned -- not unusual, according to Dr. Keith Black, a neurosurgeon at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. "Almost all of these patients will, at some point, recur. And that recurrence can range anywhere from nine months to two or three years," he says. "When they do recur, the options are either a repeat operation, or radiosurgery with the x-knife or gamma knife."

The radiosurgery was Pickrell's choice.

He had a frame placed on his head using screws which penetrated through deadened skin into his skull. A machine swirled around him, aiming radiation at his tumor, while sparing surrounding brain tissue.

It's a technology that can essentially focus radiation precisely to tissue and get the dose of radiation high enough to destroy it without the need to actually operate and cut the tumor out.

ER's character Green will have his future written for him. But for Pickerell and other real patients, the future is uncertain. Radiosurgery gives them a way to fight and reason to have hope.