Please Help Lennea Get Uncovered Treatment

My name is Casey Dalen and my wife, Lennea Baird, has stage 4B cervical cancer. She has exhausted all standard treatment options. She’s endured months of radiation treatments, external and internal Brachytherapy, and dozens of chemotherapy treatments, without success. Her cancer is invasive and aggressive. There is one last treatment available, immunotherapy. But before I go into detail about this treatment, I wanted to take a moment to tell you about Lennea from the point where I met her in 2013.

About Lennea

When Lennea and I first met she was living in a bus on Salt Spring Island with her 4 year old daughter. I was living in a small apartment with my two young daughters (2 and 5 y/o). Both Lennea and I had been single handed with our daughters for some time. We were stressed. She had been earning a living selling Sprouted grain chips at the Salt Spring Market - Cosmic Chuckle Chips. I fell in love instantly. I have never met a more charming lady. My business was just taking flight. I had been selling liniments at the market and I think I had my product in one or two stores at the time.

Becoming a Family

We met through an ad Lennea placed on the Salt Spring Exchange. She was looking for a place to park her bus, and in exchange she was offering to make smoothies and give health advice. Lennea is a trained Nutritionist. I faked being a vegetarian; if she had found out I was a meat eater, I doubt she would have been attracted to me.

Meeting Lennea was a breath of fresh air for all of us. Instantly our children bonded. They even looked like sisters. Over the next few years our business grew to a point where we needed more space. We discovered Salmo and fell in love with the mountains, clean water, and good people. I proposed to Lennea in 2015, but it took us until 2019 to have our wedding. We never really wanted to be away from our children, so we decided not to take a honeymoon. After all, we would have the rest of our lives together. I started work as a Paramedic on BC Ambulance and Lennea took on more of a role managing our business. Our future was looking good.

Lennea first started noticing symptoms in 2018. She was turning a light shade of green every morning, and was having a lot of abdominal pain. She started seeking medical attention over the course of the year but was often given antibiotics. By the time the pandemic was taking hold she was waitlisted and waitlisted, and any doctors visits she could press for were just over the phone. She was given a gynecologist appointment date of sometime the following YEAR..! After literally screaming for help, she got a stat gynecologist examination. I will never forget the look on the doctor's face when she told us “something is very very wrong”. The doctor’s pupils constricted to pinpoint as she told us. After some expedited diagnostics, Lennea was diagnosed with stage 3B cervical cancer.

This was unbelievable news. Lennea is someone who has done everything right in life. She is a vegetarian, a health fanatic. And I do mean fanatic. She has never smoked, hardly ever drank more than a half glass of wine a couple times a year, she is generally the most innocent woman I have ever met. Yet the doctors tell us that it must have been growing for over a decade and the cancer was so far up her cervix and into her uterus that it was missed on previous pap smears.

The Cycle of Treatments

We were immediately off to Kelowna for treatment. Our daughters came with us and at great expense I did everything possible to keep up family morale during this very dark period. After months of treatment, we were optimistic. The doctors seemed confident; we had grown closer as a family and we were certain that the torture was over, and our lives could resume. We were optimistic that the treatment had been a success.

Sadly, after a couple of months of being home, Lennea started to get sick again. The follow up scan some three months later was devastating. Lennea’s cancer has spread. It is everywhere now. The doctors told us with little confidence that further treatments would hopefully prolong life. And now, those treatments have not stopped the cancer from spreading. They have discontinued chemotherapy. When we discovered that Lennea’s cancer had progressed to Stage 4B and was now considered terminal, we started to talk about end of life. One of Lennea’s biggest worries is that she may pass, and our daughters will no longer be sisters. Her daughter would return to live with the child’s father in Kamloops. This thought of Lennea’s daughter losing her mum and becoming disconnected from her sisters was more than Lennea and I could bear.

Finding Respite

Last summer we took a trip to Savary Island. It was a welcome break from the darkness we’ve experienced this past year. Seeing our girls happy and having fun was heartwarming. So I devised a plan. I purchased a small cabin and have laid the groundwork for a family trust. Our hope is that our daughters will get together every summer on Savary Island. We have named the cabin “Lennea’s Cabin”.

We really couldn’t afford this. I broke the bank to make it happen, but it’s honestly the most important and selfless thing I have ever done. Our girls are counting the days until they can go back to Lennea’s Cabin and right now we need hope. Watching Lennea’s regression has been heartbreaking. Our girls need something to look forward to.

One last glimmer of hope has just been presented to us this month. There is a new treatment that Lennea’s oncologist can administer here in Canada. It has shown much promise in advanced cases such as Lennea’s. It’s an immunotherapy treatment with a 25% to 30% chance of a “durable” regression. But it’s not covered by Provincial Health and costs approximately $8000 every three weeks.

This brings us to our predicament today. I am now leveraged to my limit and unable to pay for this treatment. I am willing to liquidate everything I own to get Lennea this treatment, but the property on Savary belongs to our daughters and selling it would not even cover the debt it carries. A friend suggested we do a fundraiser and I asked her to be executor of the funds raised. Any money collected will go towards Lennea’s treatment. And any funds left over will be put in a trust account for her daughter.

And this is where you can make a difference. We are asking for your help to cover the costs of this new treatment. Any amount you can contribute will be appreciated beyond measure. It is only with your love and generosity that we will see this through.