Help Andrew Rebuild After Beating Cancer

 

On March 30th, 2022, I brought my then 26-year-old son, for flu-like symptoms that weren’t going away, and pain in his back. After an hour of waiting, a very somber looking Dr. came in and told us that he had lymphoma and a tumor in his spine and immediately admitted him and started a bed search for Boston hospitals.  At this time, we weren’t sure he was going to make it. It didn’t seem hopeful. Literally every parents’ and person’s worst nightmare. 

The following day, he was transported to Dana Farber, where he would then be re-diagnosed with an inoperable tumor and B-Cell Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia. This was the beginning of a very initial hospital stay over over a month, and not the last of such long stays. 

Almost a month to the day of Andrew’s diagnosis, I had left my job as Clinical Director at a large non-profit and all of the benefits that came with that, to work for my own fairly new, developing, group-practice. I had a full caseload of clients depending on me and I had no paid time-off.

However,  I stayed in the hospital with Andrew every single day he was there, driving back to the South Shore and sometimes Cambridge each night, where luckily, I had friends who opened their homes up to me for the duration of his treatment. I physically moved into the South Shore house for over six weeks during one stay, and drove into Boston every single day from there. I truly don’t know what we would have done without them. Staying in Boston would not have been possible financially. So we were so lucky! 

Throughout his chemotherapy treatment, Andrew had every known side effect from the treatments, spent (scary)time in the ICU, had blood clots in his heart and lung, had two full hip replacements and, when he wasn’t hospitalized, we traveled to Boston, starting 4 times a week then down to once a week for the last year, from Western Mass (2-4 hours each way depending on traffic), to get chemotherapy.

Monday, July 29th, at age 29, he got his last chemotherapy treatment and is tumor and leukemia free. 

It has been a struggle the last few years for our family, as you can imagine. And now, Andrew has to start his life over again. He never went back to his apartment after that March 30th ER visit. After he was initially discharged from the hospital, he moved back home, into my home-office, and left his whole life behind.  We paid off his lease and most of the stuff in his apartment stayed behind.  We have continued to pay his other bills, his car payment, student loans, credit card, insurance etc. Interestingly enough, the bills don’t stop even when something like this happens. We didn’t want his credit to be ruined at the end of all of this, so we took over everything. We have replaced his wardrobe multiple times because his weight has been so inconsistent throughout treatment. It went down to 120 pounds at one point and then with steroids, shot back up.  Just sharing because these are all things no one really thinks about or realizes happen on the background if you haven’t been there.  

Now that he is facing starting over again, it feels incredibly overwhelming after such a fight, to figure out the next steps. And while we have taken care of everything financially for him the best we can through all of it to preserve his credit, it still takes a lot to start your life over again from scratch- especially after what he’s been through. 

It is incredibly difficult for me to even have created this, as I am not one to ask for help, but the power of friends, family and sometimes even strangers, is so much stronger than what we can do alone.

Any support would be amazing. We are hoping to be able to get enough together to make the enormous pressure of starting over from scratch feel a little bit less out of reach.

As an aside, because of experiencing first hand what something like this can do to a family, I started a non-profit called Panda Bugs, Inc. with the sole purpose of providing support for families going through long-term, time intensive illness like this.  We also have an adult daughter who struggles with life-altering autoimmune conditions. We called Andrew, Andrew Panda bear as a baby, and his sister Kayleigh Bug- thus Panda Bugs was born.   It is fully registered as a 503(c)(1) charitable non-profit and being worked on behind the scenes. I am hoping to have it fully up and running within the next year once I am able to give it my full attention.  I just want everyone to know that I will be doing my best to give back and to help other families who find themselves in similar situations. I do not take asking for help lightly.