This is our son Tyler.

He has a very long story about his life and all the struggles that he has been through.

He was born with a very rare condition called prune belly syndrome.And in his 27 years, we have only seen 2 doctors that have ever had a prune belly patient. But it comes with some severe complications, and one of those is kidney failure. He has had to have some major reconstructive surgeries throughout his life.

He lost both kidneys when he was 9 years old and then started dialysis at Children's Hospital. We were doing anything to try and get him a kidney. We could not watch our baby suffer and go through all of that pain. So what any good father would do is go through all the testing there was to see if he could give our precious boy one of his kidneys. And sure enough, a miracle because he was a match. So in 2009, they were side by side in the operating room and everything went great. And so day by day, we started seeing life again from our son. And we finally started to have somewhat of a normal life. We still have had our struggles and had some hospital stays.

I have always been our son's caregiver at home and when at the hospital day and night, so I have not been able to work. And so that has put everything financially on to dad. We have always only had one vehicle and still do only have one. But dad has always made it work. He takes us to every single doctor's appointment and surgery, has stayed every single night with us at the hospital, and back and forth to work.

And then in 2022, we got the devastating news that our son lost the kidney dad gave him after 14 years and was then put back on dialysis. We took that news very hard. Our son is our everything; he is our only child.

So when he was put back on dialysis, the dialysis center was very careless with him, and he got a very bad infection in his dialysis catheter, which then ate his heart valve and almost killed him. He had to be care-flighted to the heart hospital to have emergency open-heart surgery on 9/11 of last year, and they didn’t think he would make it through all of that. But he is a miracle, and us 3 walked out of the heart hospital holding hands together because we thought we weren’t going to leave from there with him. And went home.

But still on dialysis, so we had to find a new center to go to no matter where we had to drive to because we were not allowing our son to go back to that same clinic. So we found one 45 minutes from our home. So 3 days a week for a whole year, we got up at 4 am, and dad drove us 45 minutes away, dropped us off for dialysis, and drove 45 minutes back to go to work. We did dialysis for 4 hours; dad would use his lunch break and drive back to pick us up, take us home, then he would go back to work. And it was very hard for him, but we will do anything for our son. But it was starting to get to us financially.

So we did the next thing, which was find a dialysis center that does training for hemodialysis that I could do at home. So on the road again, but this time it was an hour and 15 minutes away from our house. So we did the same routine: dad drops us off and back to get us. So we went through the 6 weeks of training and finally did it. Our lives were going to finally slow down a little and get back to a kind of normal routine. We were so happy to just be home again without all the running back and forth, and financially we could not do it.

We got in one week of dialysis at home, and then that following Monday, Tyler’s dialysis line stopped working. So surgery was scheduled for the very next day to have a new port put in. Got home, and the bleeding would just not stop. So we took him to the ER.

They were able to stop the bleeding, but then the doctor came in and told us Tyler now has AML leukemia, which is a certain type of blood cancer.

That was the most devastating thing that could ever happen to him. That took us to our knees. We just don’t understand; he does not deserve any of this. He is the greatest. He has never disrespected dad or me, not once, never has given us any trouble. He has never smoked, done any drugs, or drank. It’s just not fair for him at all.

So we are now at OSU James Cancer Center doing rounds of chemotherapy with a few different medications. And it could possibly make him very sick. But when I tell you our son is a fighter and a walking miracle already, we are going to fight this together like everything else.

But we also have other things that need to be taken care of, but none of that is more important than him. So I’m already with him day and night, and dad does not want to lose one more minute of time to be with our son while he’s going through his first round of chemotherapy, so he is going to be taking off work for some time, which then means we will financially be hurting. And all the years we have struggled and have never used his disability for any type of help. It is just us 3 and 2 fur babies. We hardly have any family.

So we are in a desperate time of need right now, and we hate to ever have to ask for help, but we have to this time. Anything would help us. And please, we need lots of prayers for our sweet boy and that us 3 will be walking out of here holding hands.

Thanks from the bottom of our hearts to everyone that has taken their time to read our son's story and for the help.