Hello,

my name is Sylvia Williams and this is my son Tonio shavers Jr. His lifelong dream was to make it to the NFL He was always a good kid & grew up into a nice young man. He lost his dad in 2016 at the age of 13 due to health issues so I tried my best to help get him through high school & college on my own. Then in 2019 covid came and messed up a lot of his college aspirations so he came back home to St Pete and started working for the city of St Petersburg & he has been working with the city since he was 20. He is a youth development worker with the Parks and recs department at shore acres rec center. His days is consisted of long days at work and still coming home to work out & go to the gym & he also coaches his youth flag football teams for the rec center and other things. So with that being said I can remember it was on a Wednesday in March 2022/23 really it was before that like a couple of months before March but I noticed he had started losing weight & throwing up a lot randomly, couldn't hold food on his stomach nun of that. I just figured he was fine because it was all muscle and I know he worked out a lot but then he started getting smaller and smaller to me So I begged him to go to the hospital and what we heard that day March the 19th I will never forget.. at St Anthony's hospital in St Petersburg Florida they told my son it looks like he has cancer tonio didn't want to tell me & he didn't want to believe it he was broken.. So he checked himself out of the hospital that day. so the next day I got a call from Dr Peterson and he told me that it looks like my son has cancer and he needed to get back to the hospital for further testing so that's what we did. They sent us to a sarcoma specialist Dr rizk over at Tampa general hospital and she did her testing, X-rays, blood test & the whole nine yards. She told me that my son had something called e p i t h e l o i d h e m a n g i o e n d o t h e l i o m a (EHE). It is a rare Cancer that she would treat as a chronic disease since there was no exact cure. thankfully the lesions in his lungs, spine, & liver weren't as big and she assured us that this could be treated. So we fast forward to today He's not on any Medicaid or none of the government assistance things because he still actively works he doesn't want to stop working. He works for the city of St Pete as a part-time/year round employee with no benefits so therefore he's been paying for his medical bills and his medicine on his own and his Oscar health insurance don't cover anything it's like I don't understand how if you don't have the money for something you die?.. I never heard of this cancer it seems the national Cancer society and the rare cancer organizations haven't either I'm coming to you all today to ask for help for my son to help with his medicine.. he needs four pills a day of votrient to live! It's so many people all around the world that has this awful disease and it's not like he's not trying to take care of himself because he is doing the very best he can. I'm disabled myself and I'll try my best but he deserves to live and he is in good stable condition he's doing good hanging in there and some of the smaller lesions & nodules are clearing up. They went up drastically on the cost of his meds & he needs his meds to continue to fight this battle & get better.. I'm learning slowly about the disease and I'm going to keep learning and I pray for the people that's out there! & thank God they have some medicines that will help only if it wasn't so much money to get.. I beg the pharmaceutical companies to just really Lower their prices on the medicine. please help me help my son get better, with God anything is possible and I know with all of your help & the lord he will get through this thank you stay blessed love Sylvia.