John's trip down brain cancer lane

Hello, my name is Kristy Richards and I started this go fund me for my husband John Richards.

John is a letter carrier for the United States Postal Service and twelve years ago a person found John on his mail route laying on the ground having a seizure. After a long day at the hospital and many tests later we found out that John had a brain tumor that was growing on his motor strip. They said that at that moment the tumor was benign. The doctors told John that he would suffer from seizures because of the tumor. John decided not to get the tumor removed because if he did there was a 90% chance that he would be paralyzed on his left side and with only being 28 years old he did not want to take that chance.

Over the past twelve years John has suffered from having seizures. In the beginning they were very sporadic but increased over time to him having multiple a day. He has a VNS (vegus nerve stimulator) machine implanted and is on multiple medications to help with them. John has also had the tumor monitored every six months by getting MRIs. This past December the MRI showed that his tumor had grown. After talking with his Neurologist and a Neurosurgeon they thought the right path for treatment now would be to remove the tumor.

The Neurosurgeon informed us that he did not want to remove the whole tumor because of the risk of paralyzing John. He did advise that there could be some loss of movement on John's left side still. On March 30, 2023 John had the necessary brain surgery and they were able to remove about 80% of the tumor. The surgery was very successful and John only lost some movement of his left hand. He is now in occupational therapy to regain that movement and so far it seems to be going very well but there's still a long road ahead.

After the surgery John's tumor was sent to pathology to get a better understanding of what kind of tumor they were dealing with. At the follow up appointment 2 weeks after the surgery, we met with the surgeon, the oncologist and the radiologist to discuss everything they had found out. John's tumor turned out to be a grade 3 oligodendroglioma brain tumor. That kind of tumor is a cancerous tumor that is fast growing. They had John start radiation right away to shrink the rest of the tumor. He will go Monday through Friday and will need 33 radiation treatments to start. He will then need chemotherapy after that starting in July to hopefully kill the rest of the cancer cells. The whole process they said would take about 11 months. John is also still having seizures after the surgery.

John is looking forward to getting back to our normal lives. He was looking forward to playing golf with his 8 year old son Hayden who just started golfing lessons.

John does have pto time that he saved up to cover the time that he needed off for his brain surgery but without him fully working and working all the overtime that he was used too; we are learning that his paid time off is not enough to cover our normal bills plus all of the medical bills that are starting to pile up and the more to come in the future. Since we were unaware that the tumor was going to be cancerous he does not have enough pto to cover those months as well.

We are typically ones to keep to ourselves and we feel awkward asking others for money but we are starting to get alittle worried about how the next year of our lives is going to go.

We appreciate anything that anyone can do for us; it will and does truly mean a lot to us! Thank you guys so much!