Russell's Cancer Fighting Fund

Hi. My name is Russell Klein. I live in southern Iowa with my wife and her disabled daughter. I work as a fabricator for a factory near our home. It's a job I very much enjoy and I really miss being there. Lately, however, I've had no choice due to medical problems.

I was diagnosed with colorectal cancer back in mid-October of 2017. I had surgery performed to remove the cancer on Dec. 5, 2017 and nothing went right with that at all. The surgery that was supposed to save my life nearly killed me instead due to complications and I had to be flown by helicopter to Mercy Medical Center in Des Moines, where they somehow and miraculously saved my life.

Since then I have been constantly battling abscesses and infections throughout my abdominal and pelvic regions. To make matters even worse, the initial surgery failed to remove all of the cancer in my body and so radiation treatments and chemotherapy were necessary as well to finish the job.

The radiation treatments exacerbated the severity of my initial incision, which had never healed, and the infection inside of it, which had never gone away. Thanks be to God I underwent another surgery yesterday (May 30, 2018) that appears to have successfully counteracted the side effects of radiation and I should now be on the road to recovery.

I have been unable to work for the last 6 months and the only thing that has kept me from complete bankruptcy has been the generosity of my friends and family who have helped me out through this Web page, and whom I will never be able to thank enough in a million years.

Thanks for taking the time to read this and for anything you can do to help.