Help Our Friend Jenny Cooke Fight Cancer

Some of you may know Jenny from San Francisco, or Tokyo, or New York. Some of you know her as a friend, massage Therapist, artist, neighbor, Aila’s mom, or as the awesome creative and inspiring human being that she is. Recently, Jenny was diagnosed with breast cancer. We are devastated, but know she will fight this. We’ve created this fundraiser to help our dear friend getting through a very tough and difficult time with lots of uncertainty, both medically and financially. And we would love your help. Please know that every dollar counts. Your contribution counts. Like, 5 dollars is you getting Jenny a tea while she spends hours at the hospital between tests and consultations. Or $15 is one round trip to and from the hospital. Jenny does not need to shoulder this alone—let’s hold her up with our love and generosity.

Thank you all, and please read Jenny’s words below.

Carolin, Cristina, and Rosi

Hey, y’all. So I got diagnosed with breast cancer. In mid-November.

And it’s been really hard, honestly.

Like, the moment you hear the diagnosis, you automatically think “Imma die.”

Because that’s what we believe, right? Cancer=death.

Which apparently isn’t so true anymore, but of course the mind goes there. And as a single mom of an 11 year old, I’m immediately worrying who will raise her. And you’re in this stunned state for a while. That thinking settled after doing some research, but since then my nervous system keeps going into overdrive. Just days of cortisol-driven panic. Because of the uncertainty, you know.

Things are still up in the air in terms of treatment. The surgery is scheduled for January 29th. So that’ll be good. After all the tests and waiting and unknowns, it’s such a relief to know this big step is happening. And after the surgery, we wait for the pathology report to see if we’re doing chemo, radiation, hormone therapy, etc.

Man. It’s a lot.

I was initially hoping to ride this out privately.

But honestly, even with help I’ve been really stressing with all the expenses, especially as I’ve missed a ton of work since diagnosis.

And holy moly if you could help out, it would be really appreciated.

And if you can’t contribute monetarily, I totally get it.

If you could share my GoFundMe so it would reach more people, that would be really appreciated, too.

As for the crowdfunding goal, about half is for medical expenses as well as 3 months of living expenses. Optimistically, I’m thinking after 3 months I should be able to get back to working somewhat normally. And after surgery and radiation my monthly medical expenses should go down significantly. I think. It’s a moving target, and honestly, my medical expenses for December was 3 times what was anticipated, so I may be completely under-calling it. I’m not sure, but I’m calling it.

The other half I plan to put towards out-of-pocket immunotherapy. Specifically, autologous adoptive cell therapy.

The reasoning/science behind choosing this therapy is, even if tests find no signs of metastasis (spread of cancer), it doesn’t mean there aren’t little cancer cells floating around in your body. They’re just too small to be detected. And it’s when those cells turn into tumors away from the primary site, that’s when your chance of survival drops significantly. So things like chemo and hormone therapy essentially work to kill off those cells before that happens.

And immunotherapy is using your own immune system to fight those cells.

When cancer cells are floating solo, it’s easy to kill them. Our own natural killer (NK) cells can kill them. But folks with cancer often have a low NK count. So with NK cell therapy, they take my NK cells, grow a ton of them in the lab, and pump that back into me. So I now have a humongous army of NK cells to search and kill those unwanted cells. So this is a huge boost for getting rid of those cells. The other therapy I’m looking into is Dendritic cell/T cell therapy, where they introduce the cancer to my Dendritic cells, which in turn presents it to my T cells so they know what to search for and kill. It’s all really fascinating science.

These treatments are not yet part of standard care, but are very promising in preventing recurrence. So it would be friggin great to do, but I can’t do it without help from y’all.

So, yeah, that’s what’s going on.

I’m just really wiped out by the whole experience.

All the researching and needles and uncertainty.

Well, the researching is alright.

Honestly, if the situation wasn’t so scary and uncertain, the medical stuff is actually really interesting.

But, yeah, what sucks is cancer prognosis is all probabilities. And you could always be an outlier.

And you just never really know.

But there are hopeful new treatments all the time.

But it takes time for it to become standard care. And thus out-of-pocket fancy pants.

Thanks for reading, y’all!

And sending lots of love,

Jenny