Join Austin's Battle Against Cancer & To Save His Eye Sight

December 30, 2024, Austin had an ultrasound done because he found a lump in his testicle. On New Year's Day 2025, while I was looking for a referral we had requested for Austin's eyesight (more on that later), I noticed that the ultrasound report was available. I opened the report and it said that my son had a 1.5 x 1.6 x 1.7 cm lesion with concern for testicular mass and a bunch of other medical terminology which I immediately began googling. Because "a worried mother does better research than the FBI."

When we met with our urologist on January 16th, I wasn't surprised that we needed surgery. We had lab work done which showed his BHCG tumor marker was 815 (normal is <=4). We got a call the next day to come to the hospital for surgery. At the hospital, they also did a CAT scan of his chest, abdomen, and pelvis. On the abdomen scan, it showed he had an enlarged lymph node. The surgery was on January 19th. It went well and Austin's recovery went very well.

The pathology report came back and Austin was diagnosed with stage 2 embryonal carcinoma, an aggressive form of testicular cancer, on February 6th of this year.

We were supposed to start chemo on either the 17th or 24th of February, but his BHCG was 3280 after the surgery. This is indicative of the enlarged lymph node being cancerous. So we began chemo as an inpatient on February 10th. We were in the hospital for the first 5 days of treatment. Thankfully, Austin has had minimal side effects from the treatments.

We are currently admitted for the second cycle of chemotherapy. Tomorrow morning, Austin will have minor surgery to place a port in his chest so they don't have to keep doing IVs and PICC lines to draw blood, administer chemo, and other medicines.

While all this is happening, Austin is also dealing with an issue with his eyes. (That may be related to his body initially trying to fight the cancer or precancerous cells.) In the summer of 2022, Austin's left eye swelled up and was extremely painful. This happened twice. He was treated once at the ER and once at Urgent Care. It was diagnosed as allergies and he was sent home. No one ever suggested he see an eye doctor of any kind. A friend suggested he try Sudafed if it swelled up again. It helped and things were okay until February of 2023, when he noticed that his vision in that eye was getting blurry, but due to severe depression, he didn't get help for it at that time. In October 2024, Austin's depression was doing better and he was ready to find out what was going on with his eye. He asked his doctor for a referral to an eye doctor. We got busy with the holidays before we got around to scheduling an appointment. Around the time of the ultrasound for his testicular cancer, Austin noticed his right eye was a little blurry. On New Year's Day 2025, Austin woke up with excruciating pain in his right eye and it was blurry. So we found the referral to the optometrist and scheduled the appointment for 1 week later. I put some allergy eye drops in Austin's eye, he took some pain medicine, and went to lie down.

At the optometry appointment, the doctor said there was inflammation between the iris/pupil/lens and the retina. She didn't know what was causing the inflammation. So she put in some lab work requests to try to figure it out, prescribed dilation drops and steroid drops, and scheduled us to come back in 2 days to see the retinal specialist. He was stumped, too. We told him we were in the process of finding out if Austin had testicular cancer. He tried to think of anything that could explain both issues. He came up with two possibilities, syphilis and lymphoma. Both were quickly dismissed. At this point, Austin's vision was measured at 20/100 in his right eye and 20/800 in his left eye; there was white stuff on his retinas. So the doctor was going to proceed with injections to help his eyes reabsorb the stuff. Unfortunately, there were multiple bumps in the road...delayed medicine, insurance issues, and fast-tracked surgery and chemo. We were finally able to follow up with him and begin the injections on February 21st.

Now we have appointments and treatments multiple times a week. So at the beginning of Austin's journey, I took an indefinite leave of absence from my job. With the loss of my income, the extra money for gas, food at the hospital, parking lot fees, and other miscellaneous expenses, we are struggling financially.

If you are inclined to help us by donating to this fundraiser, we would greatly appreciate any help you can give.

If you are unable to help with a donation, would you please share this with your circle, pray, send well wishes, or whatever support you find helpful in tough times.

From our family to you all, thank you.