Support for Isaac’s family while battling Cancer

Isaac is currently in the ICU at MGH in Boston, where he has been battling life-threatening diseases including AML Leukemia and HLH (a rare autoimmune disease) for the past 7 months. All he wants is for our family to be able to spend more time helping and visiting him, but the longevity of these diseases has made it very difficult now that the family is running out of resources like FMLA and paid time off.

Any support you could offer would go towards keeping his parents financially afloat, so his mother and father can afford to visit him in the hospital and still pay the bills. Thank you so much for any support you can give.

After finishing his freshman year of college, Isaac finally went to the hospital for the painful headaches he was having. A simple blood test led to the discovery that his migraines were being caused by his newly discovered Acute Myeloid Leukemia (AML).

After undergoing 4 rounds of intensive chemotherapy (out of 5 scheduled rounds), he became too sick to finish cancer treatment. Isaac began experiencing respiratory failure to the extent that he was put to sleep and was told he would be breathing through a ventilator (tube inserted into my windpipe pushing oxygen into the lungs) for a few days while his lungs recovered. Those few days turned into weeks, as he experienced extremely high fever, abnormal blood cell depletion, and astronomical inflammation throughout my body. While asleep, Isaac was diagnosed with HLH, an autoimmune disorder that developed in response to the cancer, which was mistakenly attacking his own body.

After he was woken up by being taken off powerful sedatives, finally able to breathe on his own, but was otherwise completely unresponsive. This was the result of the HLH impacting his brain and becoming so life-threatening, that Isaac could not move or speak due to excess fluid building up in his brain. Typically, the doctors would be able to drain this excess fluid out with a tube inserted into the brain, but because of his low blood (platelet) cell count, this would have put him at risk of a brain bleed that would have killed him.

Thankfully, they’ve started a new chemo treatment administered through spinal taps directly to the brain to fight the HLH by destroying his own immune system that was harming him. Although he is still very immunocompromised, he’s finally regained most of his senses and is receiving treatment to try to walk again.

“Any support you could offer would go towards keeping me and my family financially afloat, so people like my mother can visit me in the hospital and still pay the bills. Thank you so much for reading.”