As some of you may know, our dear friend Christine Kirk was diagnosed with breast cancer at the beginning of November. Currently, she is stage 2b Invasive Lobular Carcinoma. This means the cancer originated in the lobules of one of her breasts and has spread beyond the lobules, but it has not yet gotten outside the breast tissue. Sorry if that’s TMI - that’s the kind of thing *Chris* would want to know. She will have a right side mastectomy and left side lumpectomy on 12/12/23. January will see her starting chemotherapy and radiation treatments - Happy Freakin’ New Year! If everything goes well, she should be done with treatments by the end of March. Farther down the road she will have reconstructive surgery after all of the tissues have healed from the treatments she will receive. We are hoping and praying that’s the end of that.

The good news is all of her doctors are in agreement her long term prognosis is excellent. She has friends and family who are going to help, including expert caretakers, researchers, medical nutritionists, financial strategists, and people who can send hilarious jokes and other things to make her laugh every day as her surgeon has prescribed daily laughter!. And if you’ve got some crazy area of expertise we don’t know about that will help, give her a call!

Chris is the sole employee of a small business start up. Now she will be unable to work for at least several months. Financial troubles are the last thing she needs to worry about at this time. She needs to focus on getting back in good health. When we told her we wanted to help by starting a GoFundMe, we agreed it made sense. We discussed the ins and outs and did some research. GoFundMe takes a very small percentage (2.9%) of your donation. The rest is considered a gift donation that goes directly to her and is not taxable. We’re hoping to raise enough to cover her out of pocket medical expenses and some living expenses while she's out of work. It makes this whole thing a lot less scary for her when financial devastation doesn’t go along with the diagnosis. Thank you very much for any donation you might be able to give and please feel free to share.

Mike and Marian Willis