Matt's Cancer Fund
Hi! We are Matt and Kellie Lilly. We met the day after Christmas in 2012, and never looked back. We were engaged in 2015, and married June 18th, 2016.
In the fall of 2016 Matt started to experience odd pains in his abdomen and was sick almost every time he ate. After bloodwork, an endoscopy, a colonoscopy, and a HIDA scan, they determined his gallbladder was diseased and needed to be removed. After his surgery he still didn't feel well, but it seemed as though his body needed to adjust to his lack of gallbladder. This went on for months and months until we finally reached a breaking point when he couldn't even hold down fluids. He was admitted to the hospital the next day where they did a CT scan, and found a mass blocking his intestine. They did bowel resection surgery the following morning, and the surgeon informed us that the mass was a tumor, and the tumor was not benign, it was adenocarcinoma, AKA cancer.
Small Intestine (or small bowel) Adenocarcinoma is extremely rare in general, but it is even rarer in a 30 year old. We traveled to New York City to meet with a specialist at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center to discuss the treatment plan. There is not much research on this type of cancer, so they treat it like a colon cancer, which requires 6 months of chemotherapy called FOLFOX. Matt started his treatments in November 2017.
We made the decision to move in with Matt's parents while he is undergoing treatments. Matt is currently able to work part-time, but as the treatments go on his symptoms become more severe, so in the next few months that may change.
As you can imagine - cancer is expensive, so we made the decision to start this page to allow for some extra help. Any amount is appreciated more than you could ever imagine.
We post updates regularly on Kellie's blog, so we invite you to click the link to read more about our story, and follow us there. We are so blessed with amazing family and friends who cover us in prayer on a daily basis, and we ask that you do the same!
Exodus 14:14 - The Lord will fight for you; you need only to be still.
In Sincere Love and Gratitude,
The Lillys