Saving Grace

Hello,

My name is Gian and along with my family are asking for financial help for the treatment of our mother Grace at MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas.

My family and I are are super grateful for the your kind help, especially to those who have and continue to give out of the goodness of their hearts. We are forever grateful and pray that God bless you and yours more and more.

A little back story of my Mom, she is a physician by vocation and has spent her life taking care of others until she retired at age 65 in 2019.

Most recently she worked at the Philippine Children's Medical Center, a public hospital that serves impoverished children and their indigent family. One of her roles there was to look for funding for these sick children to augment the hospital’s free service. Mom is a devoted Christian and mother to 3 children: my brother GR, my sister Geegin, and me. It hurts me and it’s difficult to describe the pain all of us are going through to know that after years of working hard to provide for her family and now that she gets to an age where she could have some rest while still working for the sick, she suddenly got hit by something unexpected, very difficult, even life-threatening, and no known medical cure except for a bone marrow transplant.

My Mother made sure to take good care of herself physically and emotionally all these years. She never had any ailments, never hospitalized since her birth except on the 3 occasions when we were born by Caesarean Section, and therefore had no need of any medications. She religiously gets medical check ups every year and has always been healthy.

Until in July 2020, we found her passed out on the bathroom floor. We rushed her to the hospital where her blood counts were very low. Her Red blood cells (carries oxygen around the whole body), White blood cells (fights infection) and Platelets (forms clots to prevent bleeding) were all very low. Thankfully, all her other organ-systems are normal.

Six months earlier, her general yearly check up showed everything was normal. Her blood counts were very normal and she didn’t feel anything unusual.

Doctors in the Philippines did a Bone Marrow biopsy and other tests. The heartbreaking diagnosis is myelodysplastic syndrome (MDS). This is a group of disorders caused by blood cells that are poorly formed or don't work properly. The cells die inside the bone marrow before they can go out to the circulation. Most of the time the cause of MDS is unknown. Because of this syndrome, my Mother becomes severely anemic (low red blood cell count), which requires blood transfusions and medications to help keep it at a level high enough for her to be able to provide the circulating oxygen to give her energy in order to do her activities of daily living, like going bathroom and eating.

And the low platelets (for proper clot forming) puts her at an increased risk of spontaneous bleeds which always keeps us on the alert for platelet donors which very hard to find in this CoVid days.

MDS also causes Mom’s white blood cell counts to be low (cells that fight off infection) that puts her at an increased risk of getting infected. Her white cell counts went so low that she had bacterial lung infection which led to consolidations in her right lung. For this and the MDS, Mom had to be in hospital from August 2020 to January 2021. Thankfully, her lungs have recovered fully well.

Mom have been managed so far with chemotherapy for 7 cycles already, daily medications and twice a week of injections and also multiple blood transfusions. This July alone, she’s been hospitalized 3 times. These plus her previous long hospital stay and the monthly chemotherapy have been a big financial drain to us and have depleted our resources super thin.

The definitive treatment for my Mom’s condition is a bone marrow stem cell transplant. We attempted to do this procedure in the Philippines, however, currently the hospital in the Philippines can only do this type of transplant if the donor is a relative. Unfortunately all the relatives who are able to donate do not match with Mom.

We have exhausted all our options but Mom’s counts still go low that our Physician in the Philippines advised us to seek a second opinion in the US or Singapore as the hospitals in these countries are capable of doing a transplant with non-related donors. By the Grace of of God we were able to secure an appointment for this August with MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas for a medical consult and treatment plan.

We are kindly asking for your generous financial help with this endeavor to achieve cure for our mother.

Per the emails with MD Anderson, it will cost us close to 66 thousand dollars to get a consultation and evaluation appointment that includes physician visits, limited diagnostics, and review of pathology laboratory materials. And this does not cover treatment yet in which we will also need a lot more of financial help.

We are for now hoping to urgently raise at least $100,000 to cover the close to $66,000 deposit and other medications she would need while awaiting final treatment plan. When the BM transplant is pushed through, we could be needing around $300,000, hopefully less.

With Mom being in and out of the hospital and Covid causing disruptions in employment of my family members, it has stretched our financial capabilities extremely thin. We know that times are tough now and its hard to make ends meet and we are feeling the same situation but still, full of hope, we humbly come knocking at your generosity to ask for your help of any amount. Your kindness in helping us will help get our mother to be strong and healthy again and keep on with her service for the community.

Mom desires to continue her work of serving the poor and needy with their health and wellness. With your help at this time when she’s the one in big need, you shall also have helped achieve two things:

1) her aim at serving the sick again

2) having our mother grow to a healthy ripe old age with us and her future grandchildren.

Thank you for your kind consideration and we thank you in advance for your financial help!

God Bless you and yours for your giving!

Gian