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Jarrett's Cancer Treatment Fund

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So I’ve been diagnosed with cancer. It's been a lot of doctor appointments so i can't work and treatments make me tired and nauseous and weak. I need money for food and traveling back and forth between treatments and to pay off some credit debt incurred by having a rare cancer that needs aggressive daily treatments and severly restricts time for work. Whomp.


I should have known that the 2016 presidential election would almost kill me. I was in my final semester of graduate school for journalism covering the struggle of LGBT asylum seekers and politically things didn't look good.  Immediately after the final presidential debates during the last week of September my nose bled for twenty minutes like a fawcett. Eventually the bleeding stopped but I woke up the following morning choking on more blood. This continued on and off for the entire week. After some painful nasal packing that was inserted for days at a time, I finally had the vessels quarterized by an ear nose and throat doctor who sent me for a cat scan.  This was over a week from the beginning of the first bleed, now beginning October. 


By my next appointment two weeks later and well into October, my doctor analyzed the cat scan. This was probably the scariest part of this whole mess. She started the appointment by closing the door to say she didn’t like what she saw. That was the first time this happened to me and I could feel the blood draining from my face.

The mass the cat scan found in my nose blocked my left sinus from receiving any air and killed my sense of smell. We didn’t know how serious it was yet, so I was scheduled for surgery and sent for all the prerequisite tests required for my previous neurological conditions. I juggled this and the final semester of a demanding and grueling masters program that I fought tooth and nail for with no financial help from anyone, working at a coffee shop for some of the semester even though the school recommended students not work at all.

For the rest of October and through November I ran to that finish line through a relay race of Doctors, sources, professors, cat scans, MRI’s and of course the deadlines that gave many of my classmates anxiety disorders. At one point I thought I would have to put off graduating for a semester. 


Although my final semester wasn’t graceful and I didn't succeed in everything I hoped I would accomplish, I somehow graduated in mid December. I had the degree only to be left at a stand still. I couldn't look for work in my field because I had a potentially serious surgery coming up in January and I had no idea for sure what my recovery time would be or whether or not the mass in my nose was malignant or what follow up treatment I would need.

I was assured by my doctorthat if all went to plan that my surgery would be laproscopic through the nostrils and I’d be back to my day job at a coffee shop the following day. If the tumor was too vascular (meaning if it had too many blood vessels attached) they would need to take more care and open a previous scar that went across the top of my head from ear to ear and peel down my scalp to remove it.

The morning of my surgery on January 30th, now four months into my ordeal, the neurosurgeon told me that they probably wouldn’t have to go through my scalp, as they performed a procedure the week before to cut off blood flow to the mass.

When I woke up from the surgery I felt a familiar wrapping of gauze around my head from previous brain/head surgeries. Only then did I find out that the tumor was so abnormally large that it had eroded the wall between my sinuses and my brain, and that the clear liquid that had been draining out my nose for the past few months was probably cerebral-spinal fluid. Oh, and the tumor was a rare form of cancer called small cell neuro endocrine carcinoma.



All doctors I consulted agreed that I needed both chemotherapy and radiation because the cancer was small cell (so there would be a high chance of relapse) and the fact that the cancer was stage 4. Between oncologist, nutritionist, speech pathologist, dentist, and other specialist appointments, it began to look like I wouldn’t be starting my new career anytime soon. Although I picked up a few shifts at my coffee shop gig between doctors' appointments, I only lasted one shift before cancelling the second one because I was scheduled for yet another appointment last minute. This type of last minute scheduling continues today.

It would be three months from the surgery, the final week of March, before I started the four rounds of chemo that will last until June and radiation that has me traveling to New Jersey from Brooklyn for two sessions of proton laser therapy a day five days a week. 

During my first 11 hour day of chemo, a nurse told me it’s the highest dosage of one particular type of chemo he had ever seen.  My oncologists foresee a two month healing process before I’m recovered from treatment.  

So far treatment has been easier on my body than expected but I can’t go back to work until I know how the entirety of the treatment will affect me. I still plan on trying to pick up work, but I need some help.

Through it all I’ve been extremely lucky to have a supportive partner who is carrying heavy financial burdens as a result of my inability to find time to work. Each of us have fallen into debt. So this is why I need help.



Truly the worst part of all this is that until I got sick I was running, running, running as fast as I could to create a career that reports complex issues and help change lives while speaking truth to power. Now all I have is time to think about how I’m being ineffectual and broke. Any help you can give will help me get healed up so I can start my career in journalism that will contribute to resistance. Help me heal and go to work.  

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Donations 

  • Danny Romanello
    • $20 
    • 7 yrs
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Organizer

Jarrett Francavilla
Organizer
Brooklyn, NY

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