For Maui attorney Jamil Newirth the thrill of being a “Laker for a Day” was a peak experience, thanks to the L.A. professional basketball team’s partnership with University of California, Los Angeles Health that focuses on patients with severe medical issues. He got the star treatment during the Los Angeles Lakers’ home game against the Portland Trail Blazers.
It was part of an extraordinary journey that has led the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa William S. Richardson School of Law graduate to cancer remission and a sense of hope for the future, five years after he was given just 17 months to live.
- Related:“Laker for a Day”, March 28, 2017, Maui News
“I look at the future very positively,” said Newirth. He was diagnosed with a brain tumor just as he was studying for the bar exam.
As part of the Lakers experience, Newirth dined on steak and shrimp in the Staples Center’s private Lexus Club, went out onto the court at halftime to a standing ovation, and saw his face splashed on the Jumbotron above cheering fans. He was nominated for the opportunity by his neurosurgeon Linda Liau. The partnership program helps focus attention on the important work that UCLA Health is doing.
“I was too nervous to look around,” Newirth admitted, adding that he thinks he heard applause, but was too shell-shocked to be right next to his favorite team to remember.
Turning the bad into good
Newirth was diagnosed with a fast-growing brain cancer called glioblastoma in 2012. He underwent delicate brain surgery performed by Liau, and then radiation and chemotherapy, before joining a three-year clinical trial with DCVax-L, a vaccine that utilizes a patient’s individual tumor cells to stimulate the patient’s own immune system.
“You can turn any experience—good or bad—to good,” said Newirth, who with two friends launched a non-profit called UVSC, “U Versus Cancer/Us Versus Cancer” to provide financial and emotional help to other cancer patients.
The other UVSC co-founders are Chris Thibaut, a friend from high school whose father succumbed to cancer in 1997, and cancer survivor Ben Moon, who created a video Denali, about seeing cancer through his dog’s eyes.
“I feel lucky and I should use that luck to do good,” says Newirth, who has just returned to his real estate, business and estate planning law practice with the R. Clay Sutherland law firm in Kahului.
Maximizing this law research skills
Even though the tumor is now almost gone, Newirth checks in every two or three months with Liau, who is interim chair of the neurosurgery department at UCLA’s Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center. Liau’s vaccine discovery is now being offered at 50 sites across the country, says Newirth.
Newirth says he never would have found out about the life-saving clinical trial with Liau if not for the research skills he learned at UH law school.
“There are thousands and thousands of clinical trials, and it helped me narrow down to the best trials for me, and then focus on the key factors that would benefit my condition the most,” he says.
—By Beverly Creamer
