A local Army vet recently returned to find himself in a fight with a disease that doctors say can go undiagnosed due to its rarity. NY1's Kafi Drexel filed the following report.

An Army Captain who's been in the military more than 20 years, JC Bravo has fought in both the Persian Gulf War and the war in Afghanistan.

The worry for him and his family has always been that physical danger would come on the battlefield. But in September, nearly a year after returning from his latest tour of duty, he started to have balance problems and couldn't control his movements.

MRI scans revealed a rare genetic disease, Von Hippel Lindau Syndrome that causes benign tumors to grow sporadically throughout the body -- a disorder so rare that only one in every 32,000 people in the world have it.

"You know where the bullets are coming from, but this you are being killed from within, from inside you don't know where it is coming from. It's very frightening," Bravo said.

While the tumors aren't cancerous, they can still be life threatening depending on where they are in the body. Bravo came to doctors at New York Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center with tumors in his brain, spinal chord and abdomen.

"The way we manage VHL syndrome as neurosurgeons is to take out symptomatic lesions. Often when you have multiple lesions in the brain it's not possible to go for all of them. And so in Mr. Bravo's situation he had one very large tumor that was causing pressure on his brain stem and his cerebellum and that was the one we addressed surgically to relieve him of his symptoms," said Dr. Jeffrey Greenfield of New York Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center.

Non-symptomic tumors are usually left alone for observation. Sometimes they regress. Sometimes even more develop. For patients, this means a lifetime of wait-and-see.

Adding to complications, some patients go without a diagnosis for years because they don't know where the symptoms are coming from.

Because Von Hippel Lindau is genetic, there is a 50 percent chance one of Bravo's daughters, 13-year-old Gabby, or 15-year-old Alexis have it too. It's something the family is choosing to look at as a blessing instead of a curse because now they can be monitored early on if necessary.

"It's difficult to see your father who is just the tough army guy having to go through something like this," said Gabby Bravo. "But at the same time it shows that he is not just an army man, he's a person and like everybody else he has to go through difficult things. With the knowledge there is treatment, it doesn't have to be so scary.

Bravo's health is improving after surgery and with ongoing physical therapy. A Guatemalan immigrant who says he feels he owes a debt of gratitude to this country, his hope is to lead as normal a life as possible so he can continue to serve.