Cripes, Beep!

I don’t think many siblings expect to learn from the youngest one. Not many people get a sister like Beep. You’re supposed to look up to your older brother and sister. Beep did, but she never needed to. The result is she has shown us more about mentality, confidence, problem-solving, and personality than me and Abbi have shown her, combined. She just always fearlessly went for what she believes, and let the rest figure itself out. Everyone who meets her gets this very lucky experience. When it’s your sister, you think all sisters must be like that. But, Beep is the kind of person you get lucky to know in life. If you get Beep as a friend, you’ve won a relationship lottery.

Beep doesn’t “kind of” help someone. You feel every part of her thought and she never makes you feel like a burden. When Beep cares about something, she uses everything, hot glue guns and all. As a kid, she swore off eating meat the moment she realized it was eating an animal. If that’s how it worked, she would have to be a vegetarian from now on. And that’s how it was decided. In many outnumbered battles with me and Abbi, she fought and argued for what she believed. If she couldn’t get a point across, she switched to fists, knowing the risk of retaliation. She swung on us anyway.

This time, Beep needs our help fighting something. Beep was diagnosed with Stage 3 invasive ductal carcinoma (breast cancer) in August 2025 at the young age of 31. Her doctors are amazing, and they have a plan to beat this and cure her. She has completed 5 rounds of chemotherapy with much more to come, but a positive outlook. Beep lives near Minneapolis, and fortunate to have access to Mayo Clinic in Rochester, MN. As many know, Mayo Clinic offers technology, expertise, and the best medical innovations in the world for attacking this disease. The only challenge is that Mayo Clinic is best in class, but out-of-network for her insurance. For anyone who has navigated medical expenses, you know the importance of a max out-of-pocket. For treatment at Mayo, there would not be one.

Abbi and I are organizing this fundraiser to allow Beep to focus on using her best weapon to beat cancer. It is her willingness to fight while laughing and smiling and beaming positivity the entire time. We don’t think money should be a reason for making medical decisions, she deserves the best. So what better way to represent support for Beep than by invoking all of the people she has come to know, inspire, and love.

About ten years ago now, Beep was taking a big road trip during undergrad. She and Greg packed up the car, planning a 3-4 day drive from Wisconsin to California. I think we were all a bit nervous, especially since they were going to start the first stretch of the drive at about 9PM at night. But we trusted that they’d be okay, and all said a grand goodbye. Literally 15 seconds later, Beep backed her car straight into my Dad’s car in the driveway. We all walked out in shock. No way that just happened. Dad walked out, saw a cartoonish looking ball-shaped dent in his bumper and let out “Cripes, Beep!” into the night. What a classic Wisconsin statement, and in a moment that summarizes where Beep is now. We all stood there for a minute, staring dumbstruck at the damage wondering how that just happened. Then, after a few quiet moments, Beep said she still needed to get in her car and make that damn trip to California. So she did, and she went.

Let’s help her together,

Abbi & Jay