I’ve never made one of these before but at this point it is a necessity. Our happy little world just got absolutely rocked this past week. We just got married this September. About a month later I started having what really seemed like a bad gastritis flare ups. The pain got so bad that I ended up going to the ER here in corpus on Thursday, where they did an CT scan, which showed what was not gastritis but a large mass covering nearly my entire abdomen. They immediately told me I needed to go to San Antonio to the oncology hospital. When we got to the oncology center in San Antonio they immediately rushed me into surgery. The picture below is very graphic but that is the (volley ball sized)tumor they had to remove out of me, the surgeon said it was tissue thin and could have burst open at any moment. I was within about 24 hours of dying before they got it out. The tumor was biopsied and came back as a rare type of granulocytic cancer. We have a 6 year old, a 7 year old and an 11 year old that depends on us. Christmas is coming up. I cannot work for at least 6-12 weeks. Depending on some other biopsy tests it could possibly mean radiation and chemo but we are hoping not. I do not have insurance so this is going to be a big financial hit for us. Anything anyone can do right now to help would mean the world to us.

-Melanie & Jordan