Jackson and Sun Valley friends… Brooke Hanbury needs our help, in an urgent way.

Brooke grew up in Jackson having Easter Egg hunts under the Tetons and making raspberry jam and lemonade to bring to her neighbors. :) In 2012, her family relocated to Sun Valley to help another family member in need due to declining health.

Brooke has since stayed in Sun Valley where she lives with her adorable daughter.

Unfortunately, in 2024, Brooke was diagnosed with Invasive Ductal Carcinoma (Breast Cancer). Since then, she has had more procedures than she can count while initially trying to balance work and being a single mom to her adorable girl.

Starting in August, she needed to travel to Boise, 3 hours a day, sometimes 3 days a week. She was having biopsies of all of her lymph nodes that were abnormal and tagging all the cancer in her breasts. MRIs (lots!), CT scans every week.

She started chemo in September. The Red Devil is the name of the chemo they put her on, and she was in the ER for most days of the week. She had four rounds of that and moved onto Taxol, which she thought would be easy compared to the Red Devil, but it was worse.

Her body became covered with chemical burns from the inside out that looked like huge hamburger patties all over her body. Her entire skin peeled off and looked like a burn patient, keeping her in the ER in Boise for a week and postponing treatment.

After 16 treatments of Taxol, the plan was either radiation, which is 5 days a week for 45 rounds (as a single mom, this option was nearly impossible as it required her to live in Boise for nine weeks), or do a double mastectomy.

Brooke has an amazing care team in Boise consisting of nine doctors, and they decided it was important to do the double mastectomy first to get rid of the cancer.

Another roadblock: she found out that she had numerous pulmonary embolisms and could not have surgery while on blood thinners. Then she found out that she had a resting rapid heart rate of 175, so back to the cardiologist who gave her another pill to add to the seventeen she is already taking.

Unfortunately, she could have surgery while taking that either, so she had to wait.

After a certain amount of time, along with taking some injections, Brooke was finally able to have the surgery, but doctors said that she still had a bunch of cancer fibers swimming around looking for a host, so radiation needed to happen immediately before the cancer started traveling into her lymph nodes or behind her ribs. The doctors expressed that if that happens, there’s nothing they can do to get to it.

They immediately went in to begin radiation where they discovered that the pockets from the drain tubes (from the double mastectomy) were filling with seroma, so they could not proceed with the radiation until that was addressed.

This brings us to now. Brooke went in to an appointment to talk to her doctors this past week with her daughter, Chloe, and they got the news that they needed to stay the night and have surgery to perform an emergency drain placement the next morning.

The kicker: being a single mom, Brooke never wanted to scare Chloe with all of this. She has made tremendous effort to try to keep all of the medical procedures lighthearted by doing things like shaving her head and decorating it like a disco ball, then making sure everybody got a wig to wear and have fun with!

When she lost her eyebrows, eyelashes, and fingernails, all of Chloe’s friends came over and drew them on, fake lashes, the whole treatment.

But this time, obviously, Chloe was with Brooke and had to hear some hard things.

The next step in her cancer plan is to flush the inside of her breast with 100% alcohol to essentially burn and sear the tissue that was cut up during her mastectomy while scraping out all the cancer. It’s called Ethanol Sclerotherapy for Postoperative Seroma.

That’s a lot of words to bring us to how Brooke needs help, urgently.

Her next steps are procedures, requiring her to stay in Boise for four nights a week over the next 3-4 weeks.

Her whole cancer team thinks that at this time, it’s too late to do the radiation because it was imperative to start right away before the cancer fibers started moving.

Brooke hasn’t been able to work in a year, and she just emptied her coin jars to pay for gas to get to these appointments in Boise. She is currently unable to buy basic necessities.

Brooke wrote me this morning and said, “I’m starting to feel really defeated. I just don’t know what to do right now.”

Growing up in Jackson and also living in Sun Valley, I have seen how these communities can come together and help raise up our families in need.

Brooke and Chloe need your help—for rent, for gas, for groceries, and for hope.

Any amount, no matter how big or small, helps! If you are unable to give financially, sharing to help spread the word is another way of gifting support.

Thank you for reading this far and for your generosity.