Surgeons do biopsy on ‘Frank’ to see if tumor still active

WASHINGTON – It took Los Angeles surgeons 90 minutes Wednesday to extract a number of tissue samples from the tumor at the base of a Virginia boy’s skull – a medical procedure that his family made the focus of an eBay auction.

Doctors said they could have preliminary pathology results as early as Friday that will tell them whether 9-year-old David Dingman-Grover is cancer-free.

If the tumor that David nicknamed “Frank” is still active, David probably will resume the debilitating medical treatments that have left the once robust boy wan and fragile.

“We met Frank, eyeball to eyeball,” said Hrayr Shahinian, the surgeon who offered to waive his $40,000 fee for the biopsy after learning that the family was auctioning a “Frank must die” bumper sticker on eBay to raise money for the procedure. “We did some damage to (Frank) for sure.”

Shahinian said he was able to remove at least two-thirds of the tumor, which he described Wednesday as the size of an apricot.

After the surgery, David was reported to be in stable condition, his mother and a teddy bear by his side. Doctors hoped to discharge him from the hospital today.

David was told in May 2003 that he had embryonal rhabdomyosarcoma, a fist-sized, soft-tissue tumor that encroached on his optic nerve and carotid artery, causing headaches and impairing his vision. Chemotherapy and radiation treatments made him weak and stick-thin, but the tumor shrank considerably. Doctors needed a biopsy to determine what, if any, additional treatment would be necessary.

But insurance co-payments had financially drained David’s parents, Bryn Grover, 45, and his wife, Tiffini Dingman-Grover, 32. They began selling their possessions on eBay to raise cash. In December, Dingman-Grover got the idea to have a charitable auction to help defray costs.

Dingman-Grover’s auction received more than 160,000 hits, and bids flooded in. The auction winner – the same online gambling company that purchased the grilled cheese sandwich for $28,000 – posted the winning bid of $10,700. At the behest of David’s family, that money was donated to a Virginia charity that helps children with pediatric cancer.

Overwhelmed with $40,000 in donations that spilled in as a result of the auction, the family felt compelled to share, members said.