HELP MR. AIKENS TO FIGHT HIS KIDNEY CANCER

Hi, my name is Marvin Aikens. My story starts several years ago. I’ve had quite a hard time with my kidneys. My first kidney stone happened at the beginning of my workday. I had to get out of my classroom (I’m an elementary teacher) and lie down in the nurse’s office until the ambulance came to get me. No doubt my kids were terrified, but I came back to let them know I was ok. In a way it was a relief that it was a kidney stone and not something really bad. Yet.

My last stone was in 2020. It was a painful ordeal that required emergency surgery and I was in and out of the hospital for a week after. When I was in, the scans found a mass on one of my kidneys. The doctors weren’t too concerned and told me I would eventually want to get it looked at. I thought little of it at the time.

Through all the chaos of COVID, I definitely felt different. I often commented to my wife that I felt I had aged ten years since the pandemic had started. I chalked it up to being in lockdown, less activity, and added stress. During the pandemic we adopted our thirteen year old son, Glendon. This was something my wife and I had dreamed of, and we were ecstatic. But a new child brings a lot of chaos and stress into your life. So I thought this was also a piece of it.

So when I got back to my classroom, I felt diminished. I was much more tired than I used to be and normal daily tasks felt draining for me. Again, I blamed it on getting old (I’m 43) and being “out of practice” due to COVID. I used a lot of sick days for aches, pains, general fatigue, and mental health. I even burned through all the sick days I had built up in my sixteen years of teaching.

Eventually I got around to getting the MRI. Again, to me this was just a formality. It was a shock, then, when the doctor told me I had renal cell carcinoma, or kidney cancer. The treatments are quite effective, and I’m hopeful that when I have surgery this summer, it will be the last I ever see of cancer.

Unfortunately even if the cancer is cured, there is still an impact on my life. In a way, it was nice to have an explanation of what had happened to me. There was a reason I felt tired and depressed all the time. I’ve very much missed my old self, and I look forward to being the old me again after my surgery. But some of the damage has already been done. I have missed a lot of work, and we were shocked to see how much this would set us back.

My amazing wife did a bunch of research online to find out how much kidney cancer ends up costing. The answer shocked us. Even with decent insurance it was going to set us back about $30,000. She checked thoroughly and read many sources and they all seemed to agree. We definitely are not in the financial situation where we can afford this, and we are quite scared of what the fallout of this will do to our family. We honestly don’t even know what we would do if we had to come up with that kind of money. I feel like the old joke where the man survives life saving surgery, then drops dead when he sees the bill.

It’s hard to ask for help. But I know in my sixteen years teaching elementary in Woodburn, I’m part of the community. Many of the kids I taught in the early days of my career are adults and nothing feels better than running into them and seeing how they have grown and thrived. The relationships I’ve built with families, parents, kids, and other educators are what I need now. Any donation helps.

Someday I’ll be able to look back and be rid of cancer and all the misfortune it has brought to my life. There’s no way I can repay you other than my gratitude. Please, help me win the war with cancer and the treacherous peace that follows.