My 25 year old fiancée has Breast Cancer

On Thanksgiving Day 2019, I asked the woman of my dreams to be my wife and spend the rest of her life with me. Lucky me, she said yes. It only took me six years to work up the courage to ask. Her name is Brianna Kosma and she is my everything. She has the most caring soul I have ever known and does everything she can to help someone or just be there when they are in need. If I had another lifetime to list all the reasons why this woman is the one, then I could only tell you half the things that made me fall in love with her. She truly is my shining star and I would be lost without her. I had one semester remaining of college at the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology and we could begin our lives together. I had interviews and prospects for work and things were going smoothly. I even graduated with my Bachelors of engineering in May. We wanted to get married before the summer was over. But then the virus struck, now I have no offers and no interviews. I work a maintenance job for a nonprofit senior center while my fiancé works reception for a Chiropractor, neither companies offer insurance. Brianna’s job requires her to interact with patients and the public constantly, putting her at extreme risk of Covid-19 exposure. Brianna has had the unfortunate luck to be a carrier of the BRCA-2 gene. This abnormality in her genetic code basically says that she will get breast cancer or ovarian cancer in some form or another. But no one saw this coming. Especially at 25 years old. Her mother Krissy is also a carrier and went through traumatic chemotherapy and radiation, removal of 33 lymph nodes and a double mastectomy before she was 39.  Brianna has two younger siblings and an older brother; Abbie who just turned 15, Sheldon who's 13th birthday was on the 6th of July, and Stosh who will be 30 in October.  Now my beautiful Brianna is 25 years old, 20 days away from her 26th birthday and only 5 days from our 7th anniversary. On July 6th after a mammogram detected a suspicious abnormality (coarse heterogeneous calcification's) in her left breast she returned for further imaging and stereotactic biopsy of the tissue in question. Brianna and I thought it was most likely nothing, I mean come on, she is hardly halfway through her twenties and has her whole life ahead of her. She got the call on July 9th at 9:30 am, “you have breast cancer….”. We did not expect the call for another 2 days, but the results were obvious. I was at work when Brianna called and told me, I could not believe it, I assumed there must be some mistake. I dropped what I was doing at work and rushed home to find her collapsed and crying in pain at what she had been told. That moment I knew it was real and that the both of us were going to have to begin growing up very quickly. We must begin to make some decisions that most have the luxury of never making or at least not until they have had some time to live their lives. Both of us knew that when she turned 26 on August 1st, 2020, she would no longer be on her parent’s insurance and that I would begin to provide the insurance through my new job as an engineer. I have yet to receive any job offers and have had no return calls, and even if I were to become employed today, company insurance would not kick in for at least three months. Leaving 20 days of insurance remaining. We have the option to purchase the insurance her parents had and carry it on our own. The deductible is met, 100% is covered by the insurance company, and she can keep all her current doctors. The plan is $700 a month for us. We can pay for about a month with our current savings and currently Brianna is the breadwinner. Come August 1st we can have her on one month of insurance and no way to cover rent, food, transportation, or anything that comes with having to live and go through cancer treatments. Most likely by the next few weeks she will have to leave her job because of the havoc any of these treatments will have on her immune system.  She has been diagnosed with DCIS (Ductual Carcinoma in Situ). On Monday the 13th of July she will get an MRI to see if the cancer has spread and infected any lymph nodes. This will also give an idea of the grade (aggressiveness) and stage. Tuesday we will meet with the breast surgeon specialist to determine our options. We already know that a simple lumpectomy will most likely not suffice. One way or another there will most likely be radiation treatment and possibly chemotherapy. The other high possibility is a double mastectomy, a complete removal of both the breasts and all tissue and eventually some form of reconstructive surgery in addition to radiation treatment.   We have understood the severity of the BRCA mutation for some time and she has been very proactive in prevention and monitoring. It was a fight to get her testing done and to be taken seriously as a young woman in her twenties seeking yearly mammograms and MRI’s. It has been a constant struggle met with skepticism and neglect. We would much rather have been wrong and overly cautious than what we have been dealt. It is so scary that we have to make a decision on whether or not to remove both of her breasts and undergo such a serious surgery at such a young age. Brianna means the world to me and I hate to see her in pain. I know that the pain hasn’t even begun. The anguish and turmoil is only beginning so I am trying to be strong and get ahead of it the best I can. I am asking for help, help to keep my love one safe, secure, and insured while we go through this trying time. The medical bills are already pilling up. An operation like the one we must consider could be well over $50,000 and completely beyond our means but could be absolutely necessary. We appreciate anything, a generous donation, share it among your friends and family or just keeping us in your prayers is more than we could ever hope for. This is so much to handle for two young people in love.