Jen Valencia needs your help to beat leukemia

As I'm writing this, my best friend Jen is sitting criss cross apple sauce on her hospital bed, laughing with her nurse and hooked up to her first of many chemo treatments. She's resilient like that. This week I have listened to her laugh, cry, and scream when the pain of her bones producing too many blood cells got to be too much to handle. Processing the shock of getting a cancer diagnosis will make you run the full gamut of emotions. So I'm writing this to ask for your help.

Jen went to the ER in Cookeville on Sunday with severe abdominal pain and received the life shattering news that she has leukemia, type yet to be determined. By midnight she was in the ICU an hour away in Nashville with a port installed and on dialysis to start scrubbing her blood of the incredibly high level of white blood cells.

Wednesday, after a difficult week of pain management and having a multitude of tests, we have the diagnosis of Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia with genetic mutation in her Philadelphia chromosome.

She will go through minimum of 4 but up to 8 cycles of chemo, each cycle lasting 21 days. The goal is to put her in remission so that she can have a bone marrow transplant.

This will be a long journey to healing and the financial cost implications are devastating. I'm writing this to ask for your help, please help us ease the financial stress so she can focus on her health. She will be hospitalized for 25 days, at which point she will travel back and forth from Nashville frequently during her chemotherapy cycles. Most of her trips will need to be overnight stays, as she needs to be near the hospital.

There are so many wonderful fundraisers that deserve donations but I would ask that you please consider giving to this one. Jen is a bright soul that brings laughter and a little chaos everywhere she goes. She has worked at Lowe's in Cookeville for a decade, and you can ask any contractor who shops at that Lowe's just what an amazing force she is. I would ask that if you give to this fundraiser, please leave a note about Jen, if you're comfortable doing so. Any encouraging comments will be so uplifting to her on the inevitable days that she's struggling the most.

I appreciate your reading this and I thank you so much for your consideration to our cause.