Medical Care & Safe Home for Quinnly VanDusen

Sometime around the beginning of February my husband and I started noticing that Quinnly's belly was looking larger than normal; a couple of weeks later her skin began looking pale & grayish/yellow. We scheduled a complete blood count which was on, February 22, 2023. The next day I got a call saying the results were in and her pediatrician wanted to speak with me right away. My heart sank. Her white blood cell, red blood cell and platelet counts were really low. I knew one thing that caused this was Leukemia, and I could tell the doctor was trying not to use that word.

Originally, our doctor scheduled us the next day to get her checked out, but at 4:30a, in the middle of the night the pediatrician called to tell us we needed to go to the ER. She explained she had just received the pathology report and it came back showing irregular cells... Leukemia cells. That was the 24th. After that, everything happened so quickly, they even started chemo that evening.

The good news: we found it early and it’s a well-studied form of leukemia with a survival rate of 80%+, but it is still a 2 & 1/2 year treatment plan. An expensive treatment plan. We have a health share program, but we will be reaching the share limit very quickly. We are also applying for financial aid, but this is limited as well.

While in the hospital, we inquired about all the specifics of caring for our child who will have a compromised immune system, to which the list seemed endless: sanitize everything, no playing in dirt, no playgrounds and all the not fun things that come with not having this crucial bodily function. We also learned that a fever warrants an emergency room visit and soon we were talking about our 60+ year old house.

We brought up the mold issue we’ve been having, which seemed to get the doctor's attention. He asked us a lot of questions and informed us we should get it taken care of immediately. Mold is not safe for her. He went on to say that he didn’t want to scare us, but that he has a 5-year-old boy in his care who has fungus in his brain, and it was from what sounded like a similar situation to ours. Fast forward a few days, we had a mold expert and an HVAC guy out to our house, poking the house with meters and climbing up in our attic.

Diagnosis: we defiantly have mold, most probably from condensation on our home's single pane, metal-edged windows, as well as being an old house with little insolation in the walls. It’s still technically up to code, but not safe for our baby girl.

It was heartbreaking to say the least, but now what we really need is a newer home. A home that’s clean and safe for her little body as she goes through this treatment. We have been looking, but without a substantial down payment, we are priced out in this seller’s market.

We wholeheartedly trust that God cares for our little Quinnly and believe He will provide a safe home for her through the generous gifts of many! This is not an amount of money we can raise overnight, but if we can spread the word, it will happen.

Sweet and silly Quinnly