In February 2023, Travis went to the hospital for what we thought was appendicitis. Once we were there, we quickly found out he had a large tumor that needed removed. It ended up being a 6 inch, 3.5 pound GIST tumor connected to his small intestine. After 8 days in the hospital he was ready to go home.

The day we were getting discharged from the hospital we were told that the tumor was cancerous. Luckily they had removed it, but with this type of cancer he has a high reoccurrence rate. Because of this, he goes to Illinois cancer care monthly and will for the next 10 years.

During a CT scan, they found something weird coming off his liver so they did an MRI to see what it was. It ended up being a liver aneurysm in the pancreatic branch. He was then scheduled to have an aneurysm surgery and during that procedure they couldn’t fix it because of issues with his celiac trunk (a main artery in your body).

And that brings us to his recent surgery which was to fix those issues and then later go in to repair the aneurysm. This surgery was supposed to last about 4 hours and then he would stay overnight for monitoring. At 5 hours in, we found out they had to open him up instead of doing it robotically because of a complication and it ended up taking 9 1/2 hours. During this time, his celiac trunk completely fell apart and a vascular team had to come in and make a graft going from his aorta. This was the scariest and hardest 9 1/2 hours of our lives.

He was then admitted to the surgical ICU where they kept him asleep until the next day and was then able to remove his breathing tube. During this time there were so many setbacks including a failed graft (twice) and a pancreatic leak. He ended up being in the ICU for 11 days and was finally moved out of there 5 days ago into a regular room.

He can’t eat or drink anything because of his pancreas and so he is on IV nutrition 24 hours a day. He can’t even have water . He also got told that we now have to go get a second vascular opinion since his graft failed twice and they have no idea why his body is doing this.

He won’t be able to work for a very long time and might even have to go home on TPN (IV nutrition). This has been an incredibly hard time for our family emotionally, mentally and financially.

Thank you everyone who has prayed and reached out to help. We have had a lot of people ask if they can help financially so this was the best way to make that happen. We appreciate you all and will keep you updated as we continue this very long road to recovery ❤️