Paying Tribute to Tara - Support Her 3 Children

I want to start off first by saying this is very hard for me to do, asking for any assistance, especially financial, as I know everyone has things on their plate they are dealing with. This is something we didn’t ask for and couldn’t control and now it’s really taking a toll on us and I’m asking for help as many people have been telling me to do. Here’s a short story of our lives.   I’ve been with my wife Tara now for over 25 years and we have 3 beautiful children together that are now 21, 11 and 9. My wife is only 39 years old but has gone through so much in such a short time. When I was 29 years old I found out I had Hodgkin’s Lymphoma and she was only 25 years old at the time with our 8-year-old son. She supported me day in and day out getting through my surgeries, chemotherapy and eventually beating my cancer after 8 grueling months. While handling this, she obviously had to handle all aspects of our life; nurturing and supporting our son, maintaining the home and catering to my every need, as for the most part, I was out of commission when receiving chemotherapy as it was an aggressive treatment. Thankfully we got past that. Fast forward a little time and we were blessed with two more children, a daughter in 2007 and another son in 2009. Unfortunately, in mid-2013, she was diagnosed with Triple Negative Breast Cancer which has no cure. For the remainder of 2013 she had a Port-a-Cath put in, chemotherapy for 5 months, a lumpectomy and bilateral breast reductions, multiple lymph nodes removed and then 28 radiation treatments. She was then in partial-remission for the next few years. In Nov 2017, her father succumbed to his Prostate Cancer after an 18-year battle, this destroyed her mentally again as cancer seems to be all around her.   In Feb 2018, she had a recurrence of her Triple Negative Breast Cancer, and now it’s metastatic and spread to her lung and liver. We started chemotherapy and after trying 3 different treatments with no success, it spread even more, now to her sacrum and brain where she developed 3 large cysts and 3 brain tumors. Early this year we had surgery to remove the 3 brain tumors and drain the 3 cysts. Then she had 10 radiation treatments to her sacrum and while planning her CyberKnife brain radiation treatments, 2 of the 3 cysts in the brain came back and caused seizures due to how large they were. So, we had to go back, have them drained and then have 6 CyberKnife brain radiation treatments done. As this is all going on, she lost a lot of muscle in her body and is having a hard time walking due to the long-term effects of steroids, this caused pretty sever myopathy. Along with this, and due to the brain surgeries, she is having memory and word finding issues, so not only is she forgetting many things in her day to day life, she is having issues articulating basic things like asking for water or having to go to the bathroom. Then in March after getting a few CT Scans done we were driving home and our oncologists calls us and says to come straight to her office as they seen a blood clot in her lung, the same lung where she already has a tumor. We ended up that night going to ER due to a high fever and the blood clot issue to also find out after more tests that she also had pneumonia. They treated these 2 issues for 2 weeks in the hospital and now she’s been moved to a rehabilitation center where they are trying to get her muscles back to a point where she can at least walk and get around. Hopefully very soon she’ll be able to do this with assistance, but her body is fighting her, as she and the therapists are working to make her stronger, the cancer is progressing and fighting them. We need to get her home quickly, so we can try another chemotherapy treatment and pray it helps.   We all understand right now there is no cure to this specific type of cancer, especially when advanced, but the longer we keep her in our lives, the better chance scientists have to develop medications to extend her life and hopefully find a cure for this cancer. Tara is not only my wife and best friend, she’s a phenomenal mother, daughter, sister and aunt. She’s also an avid reader, music enthusiast and a fantastic photographer. I would love to see her get back to all the things she loves, and trust me, I’m doing all I can do to get her there; physically, mentally, emotionally and medically. She has sacrificed and fought so hard in her short life, she deserves so much better than all of this and so do our children. I’m seeking financial assistance for our current and future financial hardships related to medical expenses, changing of a vehicle to make it easier to transport her, a wheelchair, walker, etc. along with the kids and possible changes to the house inside and outside to make it wheelchair friendly. Also, I would love to convert some of our long-term future-plans into short term goals since we might not have the opportunity to grow old together and live on a beach in Barbados or Savannah as she originally planned, so if I can squeeze some of them in now, that would be great for her. I would love to take her to places she’s always wanted to go and do things we had planned after the kids were older and stable in their careers. If our future is going to be cut short, I would love to continue to enjoy the present together and live life to the fullest while we can and when her health permits.  This is extremely hard on our children, they have seen the strong and the weak, the healthy and the sick, the happiness and the sadness; but we need their memories to be of the happy times that we already shared and what we can still build together with the time we have remaining.   I want to thank in advance, all donors for anything you’re able to do to support me and my family during these hard times. This will give us a chance to enjoy some of our future plans while we can, assisting with medical bills and allowing us to spend more quality time together as you can’t put a price on that nor get any lost time back. Thank You, Norman, Jonathan, Noelle and Maddox