My name is Autumn McCormick, and my husband is Terry McCormick. We will be married 20 years in June. We are members in good standing of the South Asheville congregation. Here is a picture of us at a pre-pandemic regional convention, which shows how Terry looked until recently and a more recent photo of us both, showing his current health difficulties.

A few months ago (November 2021), Terry started having pain in his chest and back, and about a week later, the pain got so bad that we went to the emergency room. They couldn’t find anything wrong and sent him home with pain meds. The next day his legs started tingling, and over a few hours, he became paralyzed from the mid-chest down. We went back to the emergency room, and they flew him to Lexington Medical Center in SC, a hospital with a neurological department, where he was admitted for five days. They found a “lesion” on his spine and diagnosed him with transverse myelitis. They gave him steroids, and he regained use of one leg. After the hospital stay, he went to rehab to try and regain use of both legs. Shortly thereafter, he had a second attack of transverse myelitis. He lost the use of both legs again, including his ability to feel hunger, could no longer tell when he had to go to the bathroom, and could not urinate without a catheter. The transverse myelitis never got better. Recently he was put back in the hospital for several days with blood sepsis caused by a urinary tract infection from catheter use. While there, they did scans and saw something on his kidneys. They did an MRI and found that he had nodules on his lung, adrenal glands, and spleen. After performing a biopsy, he was diagnosed with stage-four melanoma, an aggressive form of cancer that has now metastasized into his organs. He is now having specialized and costly targeted-genetic treatment for his melanoma. Evidently, they don’t do regular chemotherapy for melanoma these days.

Terry’s appetite for food is gone, and he has lost a lot of weight. He’s tired all the time, and it is difficult for him even to shave. At the top is a recent picture of us showing how weak and emaciated Terry has become. So far, we have several thousand dollars in hospital bills we must pay out-of-pocket, resulting from deductibles and copayments. His monthly cancer treatment copayment alone is several hundred dollars per month, which we cannot afford. The local brothers lovingly put in a short sidewalk that allows me to roll Terry to the car to get him to his doctors and they have shown us much love by bringing food and giving us emotional support. We hope to find a handicap vehicle because he’s been paralyzed for almost six months, and we don’t expect things to get better with his paralysis for now.

We need God’s Kingdom to fix all these awful things permanently (Revelation 21:4), but in the meantime, we must face large medical bills for some time, and we have no way to pay them unless we ask our friends for help. So we also need your prayers that Terry’s doctors have the wisdom to put his cancer in remission and help with the paralysis? Thank you so much for your help!