Partners in marriage fight cancer together

Hi, my name is Lynn, in March 2022 I was diagnosed with stage 4DLC non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Four months later, in August, my husband was diagnosed with a rare form of leukemia. At this point, I was running a home daycare business and I had to close to fight my cancer. I did many rounds of chemotherapy and it failed. My cancer was mostly in my spleen , so the doctors said in July 2022 my spleen need to come out, it was major surgery, and when they went in, they found that the tumor had gone beyond my spleen and had wrapped around my diaphragm. I had to have reconstructive surgery on my diaphragm. I came out of surgery with two chest tubes two drains and a lot of pain. I went home and within three weeks my husband who works construction called me and said he wasn’t feeling good. They’re out on the road a lot eating and they stay in hotels so he thought he had just got food Poisoning it had gone away. But when he had finally come home Friday, he started vomiting blood. We ended up in the hospital where they did a scope, and they found that his pancreas was involved, and that he had polyps in his esophagus which they removed and found out they were rare form of leukemia . He started chemotherapy immediately and we referred to Dana Faber where we knew he was going to need a bone marrow transplant. We had his family tested. He had one biological brother and a niece and nephew and they were not a match our town rally around us, and everybody tried to become a match. It was amazing. in December 5 days before Christmas we got the call that he got a bone marrow donor from Germany. The coordination team did their job at Dana Faber and coordinate everything for him to be hospitalized in January. He went in and has transplant January 18 of 2023. he had to have extensive chemotherapy to kill off his own bone marrow. He was very sick. He was an isolation for a month while he received his bone marrow at the same time he had to have blood transfusions because of his counts being low and platelets. He finally came home in February, and we began our journey to heal, which was not an easy one. I went through many hospitalizations for collapsed, lungs infections, chest tubes, fluid withdrawal from my lung, and then I started chemotherapy again. Bill went through many rounds of blood transfusions platelet transfusions, and then he went into graph versus host where his body went into rejecting the bone transplant which caused more complications. We fought all through 2023 finally realizing for me that the chemo still wasn’t working and the tumors had come back I had to now in my liver into where my spleen was on my diaphragm. Dana Faber suggested CatT therapy. I was hospitalized for over a month while they removed the T cells from my blood and gave them back to me after they’ve been really manipulated to kill cancer. During this time we got notification from my husband‘s employer because he was not working that his insurance was canceled, we received bills from Dana Faber in the hundred thousand and we don’t know what to do at this point we’re scared they were gonna lose our home and I don’t know where two people they’re fighting cancer are gonna go to live so please if you could help with anything, it would be greatly appreciated it just sucks that you work your whole life and you become sick and everything is pulled out from underneath you. I cry many days, not knowing what our future is going to be with the thought of the cancer still sitting in the back of our minds, thinking it can come back at any time , I just wanna live my life stress-free and I don’t know what that is anymore. Thank you for reading this God bless you. And live today because tomorrow is not promised.

Fyi .. the picture above is us in 2022. It was our Christmas card we tried to smile through the baldness.