Ashley's Medical Fun!
Donation protected
Greetings and thank you so much for taking the time to learn a little bit about my story. I’m Ashley Goodwin, and this is my family. We live a relatively quiet life in a lovely community; my wonderful wife Dawn and I both work in jobs we enjoy and have the honor of raising two fantastic teenagers, Georgia and Jacob.
As typical as this all seems, we’ve come to learn over the past several months that life sometimes takes a few surprising twists and turns—and that a rapid sequence of unexpected events can make you really appreciate the simpler day to day things that once seemed like a lot to balance.
In March of this year, I found I couldn't shake a persistent cough. It never seemed like a really big deal (more of an annoyance, actually) but my doctor was a little concerned and asked that I have a CT scan.
We could have never predicted what my CT results would show. I learned I had a Retroperiteneal Liposarcoma—a mass that when removed weighed almost twenty pounds, or in relative terms, nearly as much as an average car tire! Along with it, I also lost a kidney and two adrenal glands.
After assessing the mass, the radiology folks determined that my diagnosis was "dedifferentiated," or quite simply, the kind of tumor you really don't want. This particular cancer is extremely rare; complete surgical removal is often difficult and there tends to be recurrence, making the condition especially tough to treat. To address the situation, my children and I first traveled to MD Anderson in Houston, and then Dawn and I went to Memorial Sloan Kettering in New York City. Memorial Sloan Kettering has the finest physicians that deal with my kind of cancer, and now the journey begins in earnest.
I have appointments scheduled every three months in NYC. Even with health insurance, the financial outcome of my treatment has become a huge burden on my family. My medicine is expensive, staying in NYC is expensive and airline tickets are expensive! To top it all off, no one can predict how the disease will progress or how I will feel physically. I don’t know what the short term and long term impact of this will be on my own productivity and ability to provide for my family. While I am an eternal optimist and a man of faith, I have to be thinking about every potential future scenario.
I'd like to take my children with me for one of my future Memorial Sloan Kettering appointments to help them understand by hearing first hand from my doctors what is going on in my health journey. I'd like to spend some meaningful down time with them on a real vacation. I've been actively calling in every favor I know of, trying to gather free places to stay, reduced fares, meals, etc. But it all adds up and the scales aren’t balancing when factoring in my medical expenses.
Dawn and I hope to bring Georgia and Jacob with us for my next New York City visit in March, while they are on spring break. The funds we are trying to raise will be spent on both medical bills and travel expenses to Memorial Sloan Kettering and then for some vacation-related travel. Being able to share special experiences with my wife and children while I still feel well is very important to me. I don’t know what this journey will entail or how long my current medicines will keep the cancer at bay. I don’t know if more surgeries are in my future. I don’t know what my quality of life will be in the coming months and years. With so much I can’t control or predict, I want to do something definitive I actually can influence now. I want to take every possible step to ensure that our family has time to make memories and celebrate being together.
We've been very lucky to have a supportive family of friends, church, and co-workers. I can't begin to tell you how the love and support of our family and friends have impacted my life and buoyed me along this very uncertain way. I simply want to continue to enjoy the time I have with my children and my wife. Your support will make every day a little less stressful for us and help take one worry off the table. It will allow us to focus on being the loving family we are and to continue enjoying our journey together.
As typical as this all seems, we’ve come to learn over the past several months that life sometimes takes a few surprising twists and turns—and that a rapid sequence of unexpected events can make you really appreciate the simpler day to day things that once seemed like a lot to balance.
In March of this year, I found I couldn't shake a persistent cough. It never seemed like a really big deal (more of an annoyance, actually) but my doctor was a little concerned and asked that I have a CT scan.
We could have never predicted what my CT results would show. I learned I had a Retroperiteneal Liposarcoma—a mass that when removed weighed almost twenty pounds, or in relative terms, nearly as much as an average car tire! Along with it, I also lost a kidney and two adrenal glands.
After assessing the mass, the radiology folks determined that my diagnosis was "dedifferentiated," or quite simply, the kind of tumor you really don't want. This particular cancer is extremely rare; complete surgical removal is often difficult and there tends to be recurrence, making the condition especially tough to treat. To address the situation, my children and I first traveled to MD Anderson in Houston, and then Dawn and I went to Memorial Sloan Kettering in New York City. Memorial Sloan Kettering has the finest physicians that deal with my kind of cancer, and now the journey begins in earnest.
I have appointments scheduled every three months in NYC. Even with health insurance, the financial outcome of my treatment has become a huge burden on my family. My medicine is expensive, staying in NYC is expensive and airline tickets are expensive! To top it all off, no one can predict how the disease will progress or how I will feel physically. I don’t know what the short term and long term impact of this will be on my own productivity and ability to provide for my family. While I am an eternal optimist and a man of faith, I have to be thinking about every potential future scenario.
I'd like to take my children with me for one of my future Memorial Sloan Kettering appointments to help them understand by hearing first hand from my doctors what is going on in my health journey. I'd like to spend some meaningful down time with them on a real vacation. I've been actively calling in every favor I know of, trying to gather free places to stay, reduced fares, meals, etc. But it all adds up and the scales aren’t balancing when factoring in my medical expenses.
Dawn and I hope to bring Georgia and Jacob with us for my next New York City visit in March, while they are on spring break. The funds we are trying to raise will be spent on both medical bills and travel expenses to Memorial Sloan Kettering and then for some vacation-related travel. Being able to share special experiences with my wife and children while I still feel well is very important to me. I don’t know what this journey will entail or how long my current medicines will keep the cancer at bay. I don’t know if more surgeries are in my future. I don’t know what my quality of life will be in the coming months and years. With so much I can’t control or predict, I want to do something definitive I actually can influence now. I want to take every possible step to ensure that our family has time to make memories and celebrate being together.
We've been very lucky to have a supportive family of friends, church, and co-workers. I can't begin to tell you how the love and support of our family and friends have impacted my life and buoyed me along this very uncertain way. I simply want to continue to enjoy the time I have with my children and my wife. Your support will make every day a little less stressful for us and help take one worry off the table. It will allow us to focus on being the loving family we are and to continue enjoying our journey together.
Organizer
J Ashley Goodwin
Organizer
Fayetteville, AR