Donate to help our mom slay this cancer!

Hello, our names are Emerald, Cameron, and Tesla and we are trying to raise funds to help our mom with her cancer slaying journey.

At the beginning of the month, mom went to the hospital for awful sciatic pain where they wound up admitting her after several, what they called, "incidental findings."

They found a spot on one of her lungs, and also discovered that she had a brain aneurysm. After many encounters with dozens of doctors, and a biopsy of the spot on her lung, she was released to go home the afternoon of her 64th birthday. Since then, she has been trying to get more information about how we are going to tackle this and come out on the other side.

She had a PET scan done and our worst fears were brought to reality: the cancer was worse than just her lung and brain. Both of her adrenal glands, several lymph nodes, 3 of her thoracic vertebrae, and the part that her lung is attached to have all been affected. The hospital she was admitted to is the same hospital worked at for the last 16 years and she is receiving some financial assistance from them, but it is not going to cover everything - not to mention her house bills that will need to be kept up with, as well.

Our mom is a Navy veteran who served 10 years protecting and detecting our oceans before getting out of the Navy to come home and start a family of her own with us three kids, who have grown up a bit but still need our mom (don't we all?). She spends most days now with us kids gone outside gardening, dancing like no body is watching, singing so loudly (not always in tune) to bands like Disturbed, Led Zeppelin, Def Lepard and many others, music is the way to her soul.

She also loves playing RuneScape (thanks to us kids) and watching B rated flicks like 8 Legged Freaks and Tremors.

We may be biased, but we don't think so. Our mom is the most inspirational person we've ever met in our lives. She's strong, courageous, so loving, selfless, gracious, and so much more. Anyone and everyone that has met our mom would agree. This has been a huge shock for us all, as she's only 64 and still has so many things left that she wants to fight for, including her own three children, her lumpy old dog, the tortoise, watching her 5 grand sons grow, and seeing what other beautiful things the world has to offer.

Anything you can contribute would go directly to her and her care. Thank you in advance for any donations and for reading this, as it has been difficult to write. We would be forever grateful. We have also set up a cashapp for her if you wanted to not get hit with the fees associated here $futurecancerslayer

**Update** mom went to see her oncologist this past week and had a follow up biopsy of her adrenal glad today (June 2nd). The oncologist said that lung cancer that has metastasized like hers has is very hard to treat, she said that patients usually have about 2 years left of life after diagnosis but she has some that come to her office that are past 5 years since diagnosis. Palliative care is basically what we can expect at this point, but her oncologist is going to try and stop the cancer from spreading as much as she can in the meantime so that we can hopefully get a few more beautiful years with her. There was not any left over tissue to send out from her lung biopsy to be sequenced to see if she's a candidate for immunotherapy, but from the adrenal one today, they are sending that off.

There is talk that they can use radiation and chemotherapy to help shrink the lesions as well but we have to wait for the sequence to come back. It's also thought that the cancer is not in her spine, as originally thought, and is rather in her spinal cord, which is why she's having the sciatica pain that she has been. She has another MRI of her thoracic spine this month to help figure that out as well as an MRI of her brain to see how rapidly those lesions are growing. For the graves disease, she also has an ultrasound scheduled this month too of her thyroid. I'll keep you posted as results come in and more appointments are added. In the meanwhile, please keep her in all of your positive thoughts.

**Update** 25 July

So back a few weeks ago, mom got scheduled for 10 radiation treatments and completed 6!!! This has not been easy for her, she's super worn out from it, they have her on the highest dose, and it's an hour drive to get there, then an hour back. Since this point, she has decided to discontinue the radiation because of the toll it has been taking on her, her energy level has been extremely low. We support her decision to stop for now and maybe readdress it again later when she regains so strength and energy.

She talked to her oncologist recently and her genetic sequencing came back from her biopsy. She told mom that hers the perfect candidate for a revolutionary medication called sotorasib they just had to get the financial aid approval for it so that she could start (this medication costs $15,000 for a months supply, basically buying a used car every month, or a 180k house paid in full in a year). The best news came and she was totally approved, with a $0 monthly payment for this medication! She started it but had to temporarily pause taking it so that she could take antibiotics for a UTI that she is battling currently. Her hearing seems to be getting worse, or maybe it's remaining the same but even with her hearing aid, she still has a very difficult time understanding what is being said. She should be seeing her oncologist again next week to ask some very important questions and we will let you know how that goes afterwards. She's fighting the best she can and this road has been extremely difficult.

****Update 11 Oct****

So a long overdue update is in order. To be frank, things aren't good. Mom doesn't have any good days anymore and she's in a ton of pain basically round the clock. We have all stepped up to make sure she has round the clock care as she has become stationary in bed. She was able to get up to go to the bathroom up until recent, it's just took painful to walk around at all. Her hearing is completely gone so we've been using a live transcribe app to talk to her. She's still drinking water but she can only stomach a few bites of food each day and it's hot or miss on if she can keep it down or not. I'm sorry, everyone, this isn't the update that I wanted to make, I wanted to say that things were improving and that she was getting stronger again but that's not the case. Thank you everyone for your love and support and prayers for this beautiful wonderful woman we call mom. Keep her and us in your thoughts and hearts during this time. ❤️