Dave Esken’s Fight

My name is Chelsey Criss. I am the daughter of Jill and Dave Esken. With Dave not able to work right now, My Mom traveling back and forth to the hospital everyday and medical bills, I’ve decided to create a go fund me to help ease the financial burden on them during Dave’s fight. Thank you so much for the continued prayers for my family.

I copied & pasted from my Mom’s page:

Dave’s fight:

5 years ago my husband was diagnosed with colon cancer, he had the tumor removed which was “contained” so no chemo. Jump 3 years and he’s diagnosed with colon cancer that is in the liver, he starts 3 months of chemo then a resection to cut out the bad but his liver cannot function so he was in need of one and fast, his sister matched so on February 13, 2023 he received a part of her liver. Everything was going along fine but shortly after until he got an infection which was horrible. He fought hard and by May 13th he was able to officially come home from the hospital. He went back to work in outside sales in August and life was good. After all his trauma he lost over 100 pounds but was feeling good. In August he had a CT scan and the liver was working great but he had a port put in when getting chemo and he felt a pain around that area of chest so we were told he could have it removed which in October he did. Come A couple weeks later we had our 9 month checkup and still was complaining of pain but with just removing the port a couple weeks earlier he was told it was probably still tender. One week later he had to go to ER with kidney stones and had them surgically removed and 2 weeks after that again had to have another stone removed. Then he developed shingles across the back, neck and chest.

My poor guy couldn’t catch a break.

Finally December, holidays, he felt a little better but January 8th was complaining of chest pain where port was again, so I called liver team but he regularly got blood work and it looked good so sent us to pcp thinking something else. Went to pcp who felt fluid and thought possibly clot on lung, went for chest xray the next day, weekend came and he wasn’t feeling good but we waited to hear chest results which came back unrevealing. PCP suggested we go to oncologist…?

So I made appointment for that Friday but by Wednesday he was very sick so we went to ER and they did CT scan to tell us he had 3 shadows on the Liver so they said cancer, next day oncologist confirmed. That following Monday we were back at hospital with Liver clinic.

His liver ends up with not cancer but biloma’s on it and liver is not functioning. He has a blood clot in the main artery to the liver which they can not dissolve, it’s already hardened and an infection has started raging through his blood.

So now after spending a week in ICU and a week in stepdown his liver after being put in a hyperbaric oxygen chamber 2x a day for 4 hours each has started to respond and is functioning, not fully and parts of the liver are dead but hopefully once they stop the oxygen chamber it will function enough on its own. He is fighting the infection right now which is the present problem.

As of right now he doesn’t seem to have to have another Liver Transplant but I guess time will tell on that but at least it’s stable so the infection can be resolved.

Life has just drastically, dramatically changed in just 3 weeks.

We are numb, never ever did we imagine we would be going through this.

Please pray for my husband, We could really use them.

Thank you ❤️