My Mother Needs Assistance with Medical Bills While Battling Stage Four Lung Cancer.

In August of 2022, my mother, Danielle, was diagnosed with an aggressive form of stage four non-small cell lung cancer. Since that August, she has been undergoing chemotherapy, immunotherapy, and radiation therapy, all of which have taken quite a toll on her body.

Things seemed to be going as well as we could ask for them to, with doctors saying her initial tumor in her lung at shrunk and giving her a "capital P for promising" in regards to treatment. Then, on January 15th, she woke up with extreme pain in her left rib cage along with difficulty breathing, which led her to be rushed to the ER. The results from their tests showed a pulmonary embolism in the left lung and that the cancer had spread into the right as well. The news was devastating and entirely flipped her treatment plan and prognosis. While we are lucky that the blood clots have managed to be dissolved with the use of medication, between all of her treatments and issues with oxygen, her immune system has taken a massive hit, and the cancer’s advancement has us racing against it more than ever before.

Currently, Danielle is back from the hospital and resting at home on oxygen. The doctors want her to begin chemotherapy immediately, but oncologists have warned that with her immune system so weakened, she’s too vulnerable to potential illness and may not have the best chance of recovering from chemos side effects. It has been a frightening cycle of debating which step to take next since the very medicine that can save her is the same that could bring just as much harm at this time. We are looking at all of our options and exploring alternative treatments to help strengthen her immune system before starting her on chemo again.

That’s a huge part of where this GoFundMe comes in– My mother is the primary financial provider for her household and has no way of working with all of this going on. My father, brother, and I are all doing what we can to make up for the income loss, but unexpected medical costs have made it virtually impossible to just get by in a wildly expensive time of emergency. This stress is not only hard on us but especially so on my mother, and it is hard to overstate how important for her outcome it is that she is able to relax as much as possible. Any and all assistance donated to this GoFundMe will go directly into medical bills and will cover whatever gaps the household cannot cover themselves.

We cannot thank you enough for donating, sharing, and generally wishing us well. We’re all pretty scared over here, and trying to brave our way through it with optimism still in mind. Whatever the outcome may be, a priority for us is that my mom is able to live the rest of her life happily and with the best health possible. Being able to put financial worries to rest, even just by a little, would improve her quality of life greatly and give us more ability to band together and focus on her medical journey and on one-another as well.