Dear family, friends, and viewers of this campaign,

My name is Christina Pinciotti, and I am reaching out to ask for your help and support on behalf of my fiancé, Andre Lewis– a hard-working, resilient, nearly 31 year-old, who has recently been diagnosed with Stage 3b testicular cancer. To be more specific, Andre has an extragonadal non-seminomatous germ cell tumor in his retroperitoneum (back) comprised of yolk sac cells.

Our Story:

Andre and I live in Chicago, and he works for the Chicago Cubs on their Video Production team. When he isn't working, Andre likes to watch or attend sporting events (Go Cubs!), play hockey, go to the gym, and hang out with friends and family. Whether Dre and I are at home or out exploring the city, we love to try new restaurants, walk by the lakefront, or rollerblade down to the beach.

Andre and I got engaged in June of 2025, and we have been together since the fall of 2017. Since then, we have been through many different phases of life, went through periods of long distance, but both of us were determined to make our relationship work. However, all of those ups and downs pale in comparison to what we are facing now. Up until this point, we have been busy planning our October 2026 wedding until we learned of his diagnosis at the end of March. It definitely put a road block into our wedding year that we didn't previously expect.

Andre is one of the most hard-working, passionate, dedicated, driven, caring, thoughtful, and creative individuals I know– many of which are reasons I am eager to marry him and to call him my husband. Despite all of these characteristics and Andre's determination to fight this disease, it goes without saying that there are emotional, physical, and financial burdens to this diagnosis that feel overwhelming.

Symptoms & Background:

At the start of the year, Andre had been noticing back pain– which both of us wrote off as something muscle-related. Andre is an active guy, so it made sense that it could be a muscle issue. As the months went on, the back pain got increasingly worse, and it would radiate to his hip, groin, and leg– all on his left side. After getting labs done through his work, Andre’s LDH (lactate dehydrogenase) level was elevated to 915– a red flag suggesting something more serious than a muscle strain, though cancer was not yet something we suspected. (For context, a normal range would be 135–225 U/L.) After repeated doctor's visits, Andre finally got an MRI which showed the 11.9 x 11.8 x 13.5cm mass (about the size of a grapefruit) on the left side of his body near his kidney– the side that had all of the pain.

We read through the MRI findings and some scary language jumped out at us. For example, "malignant", "metastatic", "cancerous"– all words that are not pleasant to hear. We decided it was time to get to one of the nearest hospitals and try to get more answers as well as mitigate the pain he was in. Andre spent just over a week at Northwestern Memorial Hospital in downtown Chicago where they biopsied the mass, scanned numerous parts of his body to look for spread, and ran various labs and tests.

While at the hospital, we were able to establish a pain management regimen that worked for him, get to the final diagnosis of what the mass was, and now we will begin the next part of the journey which will be chemotherapy. He will be pursuing BEP chemotherapy in the Chicago area for the next three months to get rid of the mass as well as the pain. There is a possibility he could need surgery to get rid of any residual part of the mass if anything remains after chemo.

How You Can Help:

Your generous donation will go directly toward:

If you'd prefer to send Andre anything not on the GoFundMe platform, his Venmo is @dre_1624.

We appreciate all of the thoughts, prayers, and support during this time. No amount is too small– every donation and sharing of this campaign means the world to Andre, our families, and myself. We have faith in God that He will pull us through this, and that Andre will be standing at the altar on our wedding day.

Thank you,

Christina