Help Camille Kick Tina Out Of The House

Friends, who is Tina?

There is no easy way to say this: Our dear Camille has cancer. Specifically, breast cancer—a tumor approximately six centimeters in size, stage three, T3, Hormone-positive, Her2 negative, metastatic invasive ductal carcinoma. In other words, Camille’s entire right breast and axillary lymph node have been subsumed by cancerous tissue. Bek and Camille have taken to calling this tissue Tina.

The good news is that Camille is young—under 40, in fact, to add irony to insult—and a superhero who can do many wonderful and powerful things. Power and might aside, Tina is not a foe that can be wrestled into submission. Camille and Bek understand her to be part of Camille’s body—a guest, however uninvited. The bad news is that when you are young and strong, oncologists do not want to dilly and/or dally; they want to blast Tina to hell and back with the medical equivalent of the nuclear option. Which means Camille is in for a truly trying time.

There is a plan. It might be worth girding yourself for this part—as if your heart isn’t already in your throat.

Camille’s treatment plan is: Five months of chemo through a port connected to a catheter in their heart, then a surgery/mastectomy with significant muscle damage, then numerous weeks of daily radiation, and then hormone therapy. After this, comes five to seven years of endocrine therapy, or estrogen blockers, which is in effect early menopause.

Let’s take a moment and sit with all that.

It is an unbelievable amount of chemicals and trauma. So great that most of us can’t even fathom putting their body through this marathon of poison. But Tina, folks, has got to go.

If you don’t know Camille, let me take a minute to tell you about them. Camille is filled with beauty, brilliance, weirdness and love, and their wife Bek is generous, ingenious, and loves Camille with a ferocity we all hope to experience at some point. Camille is a tremendous artist who works in many mediums.

Camille’s entire existence is MAKING things. Painting, growing, building, breaking and building again; this is what Camille does for money and for fun. Camille’s body is instrumental in every aspect of their work. Camille is right handed, and that hand is connected to an arm that is connected to a lymphatic system in a chest that currently has a port in it that sits directly atop a pile of cancer. That port is about to deliver boatloads of poison to Tina, but also to Camille. Which means they cannot do the things they need to survive, at least not in the way they might normally, for a solid year, best case scenario.

On top of everything, the toxicity of chemotherapy will render Camille infertile. And so amidst all odds, Bek and Camille are undergoing a tuck-and-roll 20mph cycle of fertility preservation now, to retain the remote possibility of doing IVF down the road.

Camille was non-binary before we had words for it, and being a queer person who has discovered peace and joy in their body yet this same body is trying to kill them is a special kind of hell.

If you are a living, breathing meatbag, you might have some awareness of the dehumanizing and draining experience of navigating our healthcare/insurance industry under capitalism. You might even know how prohibitively expensive it is for queer people to bring life into this world. Therefore, you might have an inkling of a concept of how much of a marathon this is, and what this endeavor is going to cost (has already cost): emotionally, physically, and financially.

So we are here to ask for communal uplifting: emotional, physical, and financial.

Not needing to worry about things like utility bills or groceries would be tremendous in helping Camille heal and harness energy. I don’t know if you know anything about cancer drugs, but even the best insurance leaves you with incredible debt.

Therefore we are launching this thing in hopes to uplift a queer artist who happens to be one of the very best human specimens around, to help with these things:

Summon the spirits. Ululate your invocations. Open your wallet, send up some vibes, and please help in any of the myriad of ways listed above. Any communal support is always appreciated - monetary or not! Hell, give Camille’s highly rewarding band CAIV a listen on the various platforms. The algorithms love that. Or reach out if you’re interested in purchasing an art.

Join us to provide an ongoing, GFM-supplied source of support and stay connected with more in depth updates from Cam & Bek in narrative form.

With much love,

The Camille A. Committee of Awesome, a.k.a CACA*

(aka Leila Brillson and many more people but GoFundMe is requiring me to put my name. I am Cam’s best friend of about 30 years, and am

helping them manage their funds for this horrific ordeal.)

*because cancer is poop.