Rally for Eric: Battling Cancer Together

Hey everyone, we are Eric and Veronica. I still can’t believe that I’m writing this. On October 21 of this year, we received some pretty devastating news. Eric had been a little under the weather and in some pain. Anyone who knows Eric knows he doesn’t go to the doctors. I asked several times over the course of a few weeks if he’d like to go to the doctors. He politely declined all such offers until he didn’t. He had some pretty serious pain on October 20/21. I finally got him to go to the ER (I thought he was having a heart attack). They ruled out a heart attack pretty quickly and thought that maybe he had a blood clot in the lungs from his symptoms. They scheduled a CT scan. It came back negative for blood clots, but he had pneumonia. They started talking about shadows on the CT. They started using the C word. It was not phrased as a possibility but more like a definite thing. We had only been there for about 3 hours at this point. It was so surreal (I still can’t wrap my head around it). He spent that week in the hospital getting poked and prodded. They offered very little in the way of hope. Eric is stage four. It started in the prostate and has metastasized into his bones. He got released from the hospital on October 25th (his 47th birthday).

This past Tuesday, he had a port put in. Thursday, the port was used for the first round of chemotherapy. Here is hoping that he can handle any side effects and that it relieves some of his pain and maybe slows the cancer down. Please understand that they are offering no cure, we are trying for quality of life and hopefully more time. We have already had to stop one medication and he’s low on magnesium and calcium. He’s falling here and there and has lost a fair amount of weight.

Now for our plea. I work full time and have a part-time waitress gig. I get 40 hours vacation and 40 hours PTO for the year. Eric is currently doing okay on his own, but that can change in an instant. My job is fully staffed, so there is no overtime available. I’m going to be using my paid time for days when he can’t be alone. This will definitely deplete my vacation/PTO fast. We are kindly asking that if anyone is interested in helping us make ends meet while we focus on what’s best for Eric and all that comes with a diagnosis of this nature, to please donate. If you can’t donate (we completely understand that times are hard for everyone), please help us share as someone else may be able to help.

For those that don’t know Eric, I’ll try my best to introduce him. He’s so dang handsome, a perfect smile, a kind, loving, and giving heart. He’s always seemed larger than life and invincible to me. If you ever hung out with him, he’s probably asked you to arm wrestle or subjected you to his playlist (it’s pretty decent, I must admit). He will definitely make you laugh and probably shake your head at the same time. He loves to play disc golf. It’s been a while since he’s seen a course; hopefully, we can get him out on the course soon. He appreciates all Detroit sports, go Lions. He’s very good at announcing the games in our living room. He tells me all this stuff about whatever play just happened, and then the announcer on TV literally says what he just told me. I think he missed his calling. He’s got three beautiful daughters that are his entire world. We also have a house full of fur children (3 pups and a cat). They adore Eric so much and are a great companion and comfort to us (fellow pet people get this).

Please donate and/or share.

Thank you so much for reading this far, and we appreciate any and all support.

Eric and Veronica