Support Karen and Sunnie in Their Cancer Battle

Hello! My name is Nicole Wagner and I am a good friend of Karen Zaremba. I am initiating a GoFundMe as an opportunity to try to help Karen and her amazing husband, Sunnie, while being faced with a devastating medical crisis. Sunnie has been battling metastatic prostate cancer for years and actually was remaining stable with his treatment regimen. He recently had his normal scheduled 6-month scans, and unfortunately, horrific new diagnoses were identified. In addition to his prostate cancer, he was told that he now has a second type of cancer called small cell carcinoma. This is a very aggressive type of cancer and has metastasized to his spine, lungs, and liver. They chose the option of receiving a regimen of chemotherapy, praying and hoping that he will favorably respond and help extend his life expectancy. Sunnie was hospitalized for approximately 6 weeks, undergoing a massive number of tests and procedures, and has had mounds of complications. He has just transferred to a skilled nursing facility to be able to continue to have skilled nursing care but with the main hopes of restoring his strength and function to be able to return back to his home.

Karen and Sunnie will be celebrating their 50th Anniversary on November 8th of this year. Karen has not, and WILL not, leave his bedside and has been his most fierce advocate. Sunnie is FIGHTING HARD! Their health insurance is requiring that he remain in the state of Illinois for treatment, but they live in Indiana, which has made this journey even more difficult. This has been the most taxing in every way, if you can imagine. If you know Karen, then you know that she has been such a hardworking employee working for Northwestern Medicine's Liver Transplant Center as a pre-transplant coordinator. Day in and day out, she is coordinating, advocating, helping, and guiding all the patients that flow through every day, in hopes of, in most cases, saving their life due to organ failure. I can attest personally to the impact she makes in people's lives. Karen, now, needs our help. She needs people to rally behind her this time. They are of course faced with the astronomical medical bills that have surmounted, but now, she is having to find means to reside in Illinois, away from her home to be able to daily be there to support her husband. She also has had to take a leave of absence from her full-time job to care for Sunnie.

Any donation would be incredibly generous to be able to help Karen and Sunnie as she is having to navigate this crisis. There is no way to alleviate the stress of what is happening to Sunnie medically, but financial assistance to lift some of the burden with all of these extraneous costs would most definitely help them. Please consider. I know that will be beyond thankful!