Sacramento Man Defies Death Sentence: Two Years and Counting After Glioblastoma Diagnosis

When Johnathan Masterson walked into a Sacramento emergency room in November 2023 complaining of dizziness, he had no idea he was about to receive the kind of diagnosis that stops time. Doctors found a mass on the frontal lobe of his brain—glioblastoma, the most aggressive form of brain cancer. The prognosis was brutal: get your affairs in order. You likely won’t see next year.

But here’s where the story pivots. Two years later, Masterson is still here. Not just here—thriving, graduating from college, advocating for brain tumor awareness, and planning his next adventure with his husband Ernie Nazario. By any medical measure, he shouldn’t be.

Glioblastoma doesn’t play fair. Only 35% of patients survive past one year. Just 17% make it to two years. The five-year survival rate sits at a devastating 5%. When doctors told Masterson he had 18 months—maybe less—they weren’t being pessimistic. They were reading from a script written by brutal statistics. His response? He decided to document everything.

Masterson reached out to KCRA 3 in May 2024, during Glioblastoma Awareness Month, and invited the news station into his journey. What followed was a intimate look at what it actually means to fight a terminal diagnosis: the surgery, the chemotherapy, the Optune device he wore 18 hours a day to prevent tumor growth, the quarterly MRI scans that either deliver hope or terror. He created a YouTube channel. He shared his recovery, his fears, his moments of despair. He also shared his moments of quiet defiance—assembling 4,800-piece Lego sets, a hobby that started as distraction and became meditation.

The real story, though, isn’t just Masterson’s resilience. It’s how he’s chosen to spend the borrowed time he’s gotten. After hitting his one-year goal with a trip to Universal Studios, he celebrated his two-year milestone at Disneyland with Nazario, the man who met him online in 2014 through a shared love of Disney and married him six years later. While others around him—people he connected with through his YouTube channel—lost their battles, Masterson kept going, kept scanning, kept hoping.

His oncologist, Dr. Samer Shihabi of Mercy Medical Group, credits more than luck.“Your attitude, your ability to handle stress, the fact that he has been so involved in his care, I think played a major role there,”Shihabi said. That involvement has been extraordinary. Masterson returned to school and just earned his Bachelor of Science in Human Resources Management from Western Governors University. He’s now an advocate with the National Brain Tumor Society and serves on the planning committee for the Northern California Brain Tumor Walk.

What Masterson has learned—and what his story offers to the rest of us—is that a diagnosis, no matter how final it sounds, doesn’t have to define the ending.“I think that what I went through shows people that we’re not immortal,”he reflected.“Life expectancy is something that can change at any time. I’m trying to put in 115% so that I can be here every single day. There’s people in my life that deserve to have me here.”That’s not defiance born from anger. It’s defiance born from love.