Shawnee's Cancer Journey: Need Your Support

Hello Friends, Family, and Community!

Happy New Year and well wishes for a great start to 2025.

We wanted to give an update (and a fresh start of a page) on how Shawnee is doing on her cancer journey. Unfortunately, her start to 2025 has not been easy. She got to enjoy ringing in the New Year with close friends and family; however, prior to this, we were informed that Shawnee's current line of chemotherapy had stopped working as effectively and she had growth in a few areas in her body. While this is not the news that we wanted to get prior to starting the New Year, we remain hopeful and continue working with Shawnee's team to monitor her health. She also ended up being admitted to the hospital right after New Year's Day due to extreme pain and is now home, thankfully, but is unfortunately fighting COVID from being in the hospital.

Currently, we are looking to get some second opinions from some other specific Ewing Sarcoma oncologists, as well as continuing with Shawnee's alternative therapies. This is where she is having the most success, from our point of view, especially when it is pertaining to pain control and keeping things stable. We, of course, continue to pray for shrinkage and strive to reach N.E.A.D (No Evidence of Active Disease) but are also currently happy when we hear the words "stable".

As many of you may or may not know, insurance companies do not tend to consider alternative therapies as medical treatment, which makes it extremely costly for Shawnee to continue these therapies that help her so much. These therapies include cryotherapy and cold plunging (which has been proven to be extremely effective on tumor growth, however, not easily accessible or very affordable here), detox therapies, supplements, compression therapy, lymphatic drainage, frequency therapy...and the list goes on. Due to the fact that we have been having trouble accessing much of this therapeutic stuff, we have at the very least been trying our best to focus on juicing, healthy diet, and making sure she has all the healthy nutrients that she needs.

We know that we have just been through the holiday season and money is so tight for everyone and we hate to ask and reach out for help like this but we also are trying to get Shawnee the most help we can. For some of these second opinions, we will need to be traveling to other hospitals for discussions and we are going to need to be able to afford hotels, food, vehicle rentals, the actual cost of the meetings that insurance doesn't cover, time off from work, etc. We completely understand how tight money is right now and would love even just a share of this page and your continued prayers for her.

While we are traveling for second opinions, if we end up needing/being able to do so, we would like to be able to also give Shawnee some opportunities to explore and enjoy life as well. She has been fighting for 2 1/2 years and continues a long battle ahead and we feel it is really important for her to be able to have some things to look forward to while she fights her battle.

We thank everybody in advance for your generosity and continued care and support for her well-being. We will continue to post updates about how she is doing and hopefully will be able to post some positive updates over this coming year for everyone after this small bump in the road to start, but as Shawnee has said, we are starting from the bottom this year, so all we can do is work our way back up!