USD Magazine, Summer 2001

"Despite coming so far. there's still a lot to explore" S kip Goebel had undergone a biopsy on a tumor in his brain, a surgery to remove it and a round of conventional radia– tion when he met neurosurgeon Robert Jackson at a medical seminar. With another tumor now pressing on his brain stem - the area that controls breathing, heart and speech functions - Goebel literally put his life in Jackson's hands. If Jackson fal– tered in the slightest during the eight-hour operation to remove the tumor - in which

Goebel, who is tumor-free and working through surgery after-effects that include minor paralysis of his tongue. "If I had stayed in Missouri, I'd be dead." Jackson has access to one of only five CyberKnife systems in the nation. The $3 million machine at the Newport Diagnostic Center in Newport Beach, Calif., is housed in a room encased in three feet of concrete to protect ochers from harmful doses of radiation. "The beam disrupts the DNA within the cells and prevents them from replicating, so that within two to three months the tumor dies, " says Jackson, who practices at two

he enters the skull through the back of Goebel's neck and navigates the delicate area using a surgical microscope - Goebel could lose his ability to speak, breathe or move his extremmes. Yet Goebel didn't hesitate. He traveled from his Missouri home to California for the operation, as well as a ground-breaking pro– cedure in which Jackson focused pinpoint doses of radiation on remaining cancer cells through a robotic machine called a CyberKnife. "The miracle is that (the CyberKnife) was made available to me and that someone came up with it in the first place," says

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