Help Michael Fight Cancer
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Hello. My name is Michael Thompson. I am 40 years old and live in Phoenix Arizona with my wife and 5 year old daughter.
Towards the beginning of the year 2018, I noticed a small lump on the side of my neck in the lymph node area and my ear began to feel plugged. My doctor initially assumed it was just allergies and began to treat for that. After a few months of no relief, my doctor sent me to an eat nose and throat specialist.
The ENT performed biopsies and in April 2018 they provided a diagnosis of Squamous Cell Carcinoma, cancer. The cancer was present in my throat, sinuses and neck. Luckily for me and my family, it was contained in the neck area and not present in other areas of my body.
The treatment was 7 weeks of radiation and chemo therapy. I was to have radiation everyday Monday through Friday and chemo therapy once a week. This was by far the hardest thing I ever had to go through.
I just finished my schedule and am in the process of recovering from the treatments. The process forced me to eat through a feeding tube placed in my stomach as I could not swallow. I still have the feeding tube but I am finally able to feed by mouth even though I am still on a liquid diet.
I am the sole provider for my family as my wife has been a stay at home mom until our daughter starts school this year. The cancer treatments kept me out of work for about one and a half months. I am finally getting back to work but I now have a pile of medical bills to catch up on as soon as possible as well as getting caught up with our everyday living bills.
Being in Arizona, we have only one acceptable ACA medical provider and from that one provider there were only three choices all of them with very high deductibles. Our insurance has an out of pocket deductible of $7000. The total remaining amount of outstanding medical bills I am responsible for total about $6000. I definitely do not expect to receive the full amount through the kindness of strangers on GoFundMe and in fact I am very embarrassed to even set this up and ask for help. However I need to look past my own pride and explore every avenue to get caught up before my family falls into years of debt.
Now that I am finished with the treatment schedule, our next step to to get a PET scan to determine the success of the treatments. I am a little scared to get the results as I do not wish to go through that again but we are all very optimistic that it was a success.
Thank you for your time and thank you for reading this,
Getting the IV port put in for the chemo therapy.
This was the mask I had to wear everyday for radiation. The blue flanges were used to attach my head to the table to ensure that I was in the same position every day. It was a very claustrophobic experience at first but I got used to it after awhile
Towards the beginning of the year 2018, I noticed a small lump on the side of my neck in the lymph node area and my ear began to feel plugged. My doctor initially assumed it was just allergies and began to treat for that. After a few months of no relief, my doctor sent me to an eat nose and throat specialist.
The ENT performed biopsies and in April 2018 they provided a diagnosis of Squamous Cell Carcinoma, cancer. The cancer was present in my throat, sinuses and neck. Luckily for me and my family, it was contained in the neck area and not present in other areas of my body.
The treatment was 7 weeks of radiation and chemo therapy. I was to have radiation everyday Monday through Friday and chemo therapy once a week. This was by far the hardest thing I ever had to go through.
I just finished my schedule and am in the process of recovering from the treatments. The process forced me to eat through a feeding tube placed in my stomach as I could not swallow. I still have the feeding tube but I am finally able to feed by mouth even though I am still on a liquid diet.
I am the sole provider for my family as my wife has been a stay at home mom until our daughter starts school this year. The cancer treatments kept me out of work for about one and a half months. I am finally getting back to work but I now have a pile of medical bills to catch up on as soon as possible as well as getting caught up with our everyday living bills.
Being in Arizona, we have only one acceptable ACA medical provider and from that one provider there were only three choices all of them with very high deductibles. Our insurance has an out of pocket deductible of $7000. The total remaining amount of outstanding medical bills I am responsible for total about $6000. I definitely do not expect to receive the full amount through the kindness of strangers on GoFundMe and in fact I am very embarrassed to even set this up and ask for help. However I need to look past my own pride and explore every avenue to get caught up before my family falls into years of debt.
Now that I am finished with the treatment schedule, our next step to to get a PET scan to determine the success of the treatments. I am a little scared to get the results as I do not wish to go through that again but we are all very optimistic that it was a success.
Thank you for your time and thank you for reading this,
Getting the IV port put in for the chemo therapy.This was the mask I had to wear everyday for radiation. The blue flanges were used to attach my head to the table to ensure that I was in the same position every day. It was a very claustrophobic experience at first but I got used to it after awhileOrganizer
Michael Thompson
Organizer
Phoenix, AZ