Help Us Fight Our Battle With Lymphoma Cancer!!!

Hi, We are Andy & Michele Kastrick Here's a little backstory of who we are and how we arrived here. We met as she says two days too late in 1991. We have been Best Friends for many years and finally officially together in March 2016. We got married on 2-22-22. I don't know why we picked that date, I guess as we get older we won't forget... Through marriage, we have 2 boys and 7 Beautiful Grandbabies that light our world up. Everything was going great as we made our plans in our journey of life. Michele's favorite place, She Loves the Beach.

And then on Monday, May 8, 2023, our world turned upside down, :( And now I'll let my wife explain in a little more detail.

Hi, I'm Micheke Kastrick, and here's what got us to this day.

I woke up on Monday, May 8th and as I pulled up my leggings I felt a lump in my groin area. I was like "Um, that wasnt there yesterday". We went to see the Dr... They sent me for an ultrasound and put me on antibiotics. Ultrasound confirmed that I needed a biopsy. Well since I had No insurance I had to find a general surgeon who would do a biopsy on a cash basis. We Found one and saw him one month from the date of finding the lump. It had grown larger, and he said the lump/lymph node was too large to biopsy, it had to come out. He did the surgery on July 6, 2023, and the lump was 4 inches long by 3 inches wide from what I could measure from the outside of my skin. When he removed the lymph node it had developed streamers-like things spreading down my leg. He cut all that out along with a couple of other lymph nodes to send off for testing. Now we wait for the results.

July 25, 2023, That Dreadful day!!! The results are back and the Dr. just looks at me with so much sorrow and sadness and says he had them run this test 4 times to make sure it was correct and says "You have Aggressive Large B Cell Lymphoma Cancer!!!" :( I've worked so hard to get healthy, lose weight, quit smoking, eat extremely clean and healthy, and work out and I still have Cancer... :( I've never felt more scared in my life!!! I have a plan for 52 more years. I wanna make it to 102. Andy and I just started our life together. So we started calling multiple agencies for help and were told they would not see me without Insurance, We were told by a couple of places I have the wrong kind of cancer(there's no federal funding for Lymphoma, the funding that is available is for breast and cervical cancer), M.D. Anderson told me to bring us $62,000 and we can have a consult. We were heartbroken and felt completely alone in this world. We did not know which direction to go or what to do...It has been a bad couple of weeks.

With the help of a family member, we were able to obtain insurance and found a wonderful oncology team at Millennium Physicians...They got the ball rolling with tests, scans, labs, etc.

I have Stage 1 Aggressive Large B Cell Lymphoma. My doctor has prescribed 6 rounds of R-Chop chemo, Red chemo, white blood cell shots, and radiation..plus more scans and labs.

Here we are on 8/27/2023 already $40,000 in medical bill debt and we haven't even started chemo yet. Just the chemo itself is going be $3000.00 per treatment with insurance and we still don't know what the cost of red chemo, white blood cell shot, and radiation will be. This is all just so overwhelming. Thankfully Andy's job is very understanding of the situation and lets him take time off from work, but it is still lost wages and increases our debt.

We are asking for donations to help with Michele's treatments. No one is ever prepared for something like this and anything helps more than you know. And if you cannot donate please share our story.

We are just asking you to join our team and beat this cancer so we can watch our Grandbabies grow up and have 52 more years together... Thank you so much and we will post updates on our progress because we are a Team..Andy & Michele Kastrick