Leanna Scaglione — a former ballerina who completed a half-marathon in March, just two months after getting brain surgery — is now preparing to run in the NYC Marathon Sunday.
“This is my redemption lap,” the 32-year-old Upper East Sider told The Post.
Scaglione will tackle the 26.2-mile course less than a year after having a tumor removed from her brain. The procedure left her deaf in her right ear and with temporary facial paralysis. She couldn’t move the right side of her face or smile, let alone walk from one side of her apartment to the other.
“That was the toughest surgery I ever went through,” said Scaglione, who works as a personal assistant. “But I just was constantly asking my doctor, ‘Can I start running again yet?’”
Scaglione has been battling — and overcoming — serious health issues for years.
At 15, she got an MRI for what she thought was a ballet injury. That’s when doctors saw that she had a “grapefruit-size tumor” in her lower spine. They diagnosed her with neurofibromatosis, an incurable genetic condition that causes tumors to grow throughout the body.
Scaglione went through two surgeries to remove the tumor and was in a wheelchair for a year. “I lost sensation in my right leg, so I couldn’t stand on it,” she recalled. She was told she would never dance again. But that did not deter the teen.
She eventually graduated to a walker and within two years was moving on her own.
“I was never going to let [my illness] define how I was going to live my life,” Scaglione said.
She’s since had 13 tumors removed — along her spine, along her wrists and most recently in her brain.
She took up running during the pandemic as a means to escape being stuck inside.
“Like everyone else, I needed air,” she said. “At first I was afraid with the nerve damage in my right leg … [but] next thing I knew, I ran a mile. I was so proud of myself and so in shock and hyped-up that I was like, ‘I gotta try this again!’”
She now regularly races to raise money for the Children’s Tumor Foundation.
Scaglione competed in the NYC Marathon last year, but she had to walk much of it after a brain tumor growing on a main nerve leading to her right ear grew so large it disrupted her hearing and balance.
This past January, doctors removed the brain tumor and added an auditory brainstem implant to help her with sound recognition.
Now, she’s aiming to run a speedy race on Sunday and finish in under four hours. She’s already signed up for three marathons — London, Berlin and New York City — in 2025 as a national ambassador for the Children’s Tumor Foundation.
“By doing these races, it’s a physical way for me to say, ‘I can do this. I get it. I tackled this. I can keep going,’” Scaglione said. “The thing that I learned the most is that this diagnosis doesn’t have to control and define our lives. It doesn’t mean our lives stop. We just pivot.”
