Help Dana Fight Cancer

My big bro needs your help. Dana and our folks have been through the wringer the past couple of years. Rick and Barb have been taking turns driving to Omaha every other day to see Dana, or taking turns spending a week at a time with him at a rental apartment in Omaha. It was required that Dana stayed within the allotted distance from the hospital after his allogeneic stem cell transplant. Dana's compromised immune system restricts him from public places and requires a lot of isolation. His intense treatments have also restricted him from even driving at times. Throughout all of this, he continues to stay optimistic and his determination is inspiring.

Dana has been very private about his struggles, so if he is asking for help, it's because he needs it.

Thank you and much love.

From Dana:

Hello all, with all due regret I’m having to post a serious health situation of mine. Back in July of 2016 I was diagnosed with the Big C. Diffuse: Large B Cell Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma. I went through outpatient treatment and achieved remission. Unfortunately, it returned July of 2021, I’ve been battling it ever since. My first treatment consisted of heavy outpatient chemo, heavy inpatient chemo, and an autologous stem cell transplant. Unfortunately this treatment didn’t work! The next treatment that we did was Car T Cell Therapy, and once again this treatment didn’t work. They didn’t know if I could do anything else and were talking about a clinical trial. After a 6 week follow up they went back to the drawing board and decided to do an allogeneic stem cell transplant in April of this year, I went through several months of recovery and they did the 100 day follow-up pet scan and discovered two new lymph nodes. So they decided to take me off the immunosuppressants so as my transplanted cells could fight the cancer. In doing so I have been diagnosed with chronic graph versus disease. (GVHD) I am currently in the Buffett Cancer Center in their Bone Marrow Special Care Unit on the UNMC/ Nebraska Medicine Campus, Omaha Nebraska. My GVHD hasn’t responded to high dosage steroid treatment, and now they are going to do photopheresis treatment to try to get the GVHD taken care of. It’s been a rough one, but I’m still getting after it! My insurance starts over next year and I’m currently on my previous employer’s cobra insurance and am expecting to be doing more treatment. Anything helps, and thank you all so very much!