Help with Brantley’s medical bills!

My name is Nick Hall, I work as a Deputy Sheriff and School Resource Officer in Vermillion County Indiana.

I have some very close friends that have just been devastated by some news that shook the family!  Brantley is a 5th grader at North Vermillion Elementary and is way too young to go through this!

The following is from his mother Sarah (Lewis) Hathaway;

Yesterday Brantley had his appointment with Dr. Blazin, the lymphoma specialist at Riley. After consulting with the pathologist and another one of her colleagues, we have a diagnosis of Nodular Lymphocyte Predominant Hodgkin Lymphoma (NLPHL if you look it up online).

It’s very rare, and accounts for somewhere between 5-15% of all Hodgkin’s cases. Dr Blazin said of those cases, only 15% present the way Brantley has, with no obvious symptoms aside from the lump on his neck, and with reactive lymph nodes in other spots of the body. (B said OF COURSE he’d be the rare one ).

The PET scan did show that he has spots in his chest, abdomen, and groin as well. Thankfully there aren’t a ton of them- looking at the images maybe one lymph node per section, aside from the neck and a few in his armpits. Because of the locations, he is classified as stage 3. Dr Blazin said this is a slow growing cancer, and he’s likely had it for a pretty long time. It IS one of the most treatable cancers, with success rates of 90%+ after the first course of treatment.

Because it IS slow growing, she was comfortable waiting until after Christmas and the new year to start treatment.

We will start January 8th, so he’ll be in the hospital for his birthday on the 12th. B will have four rounds of chemotherapy, each round lasting for a month. The first 2 rounds he will need to be inpatient for 1-2 weeks, and then he’ll be able to do the rest of the month outpatient or at home. Because the chemo rounds are so aggressive and he’ll be on a combination of different medicines, she said he won’t be able to go to school in person next semester. He was a little bummed about that, but she was confident he’d be better by late spring or early summer, hopefully in time for him to play baseball even.

While all of the information was A LOT and treatment is going to be tough, we feel very positive overall. Dr. Blazin said she was 100% confident that B would be cured and go on to live a long and healthy life.

Knowing that we have a positive outcome waiting for us at the finish line, regardless of how long it takes to get there, makes us feel more optimistic than we’ve felt in weeks. Dr. was very honest with B and with us that it’s going to be hard and he’s going to feel bad along the way, but the hard stuff is going to be worth it because he’s going to be better eventually.

We appreciate everyone reaching out, checking on us, praying or sending us well wishes… all of it. We have so many wonderful friends and an amazing community and we just couldn’t be more thankful. When we tell the nurses about our small town and how wonderful everyone has been, they say, “Wow! I kind of want to move to your town!” Every place has its positives and negatives, but the way everyone comes together when times get tough makes me so SO thankful to call this town our home.