Hi, My name is Terry Humphries and my brother-in-law Garth has been fighting mantle cell lymphoma since 2019. My sister Maureen and their son Spencer need your help. Garth is in the end stage of his disease. Mantle Cell is always terminal. The financial burden of fighting for 4 years has taken its toll. Maureen would like to spend these last days/weeks supporting Garth as he declines. Her son cannot do it alone, even with home support and some nursing care. Garths' last wish is to die at home with his family around him. Maureen needs to be off work. Being self-employed and the only income earner this is an extreme hardship. She has already lost $25,000 in income in the past year to advocate for him while in hospital and care for him at home when he needed it. Yet her expenses have gone up with ferry, gas, parking, food, supplies and accommodation expenses. Palliative only kicked in recently to pick up the tab for meds and some supplies.

So please help my sister Maureen, the strongest woman I know help her husband, the bravest man I know. Maureen and Spencer both need some support. This fund will help recover some costs, pay for ongoing expenses and help cover funeral expenses. Any leftover funds will help Spencer further his education to make his dad proud. At 21, he has put his life on hold to help his dad and has been doing caregiving alongside his mom. And Garth needs a lot of caregiving.

He is deteriorating neurologically from the mantle cell attacking his central nervous system. It is spread throughout his brain and spinal cord causing an untold number of symptoms that are affecting his ability to walk, use his hands, speak, eat and groom or move. The symptoms can come on and then turn off without warning and it is scary to see him in his episodes. He has been in and out of the hospital this past year since he relapsed in March 2022 with alarming regularity.

He has had 9 lines of treatment including radiation 3 times on his brain and spinal cord. The chemo has been brutal on his body with horrific side effects. He has had 22 blood transfusions and a stem cell transplant but now his bone marrow is nearly burnt out. And yet he fights on. The average line of treatments a mantle cell patient can tolerate is 4 before their body is too weak and they die. He is still on his ninth line of treatment. It is an experimental drug that needed special permission from Health Canada to use in his very extreme case.

There is still the slightest glimmer of hope. It can take 2 months for the drug to take effect. It has been 3 weeks but his cancer marches on. We are at a place where the cancer is moving faster than the treatment can work because it is so widespread. The first treatment for his CNS disease was so toxic he went into kidney failure and had to recover completely before his next line which is this trial drug so the cancer marched on. If by some miracle he pulls through and this drug works he would move to the next line of treatment called CAR-T cell therapy which is a 2-3 month treatment in another province.

Whether he lives and moves on to CAR-T or succumbs to this horrible illness, this family needs our help. Please give what you can even if it is $5.00. They will be forever grateful.

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