You can keep track of progress at http://www.facebook.com/pages/Fighting-Cancer/123805111044731

I thought long and hard about whether to post this today or not. I was going to wait until we had more information on where things are going, but the simple truth is that as far as the immediate future is concerned, we already know. We have contacted the majority of the family, and I think it’s only fair that her friends and supporters know what is happening as well.

I apologize if you are family and just learning about this for the first time. I have tried to contact everyone, but that is just not possible.

As you all know Jenny has been in the hospital with Valley fever caused pneumonia. She has been very sick, unable to eat and has been refusing her feeding tube because of sever nausea. She also developed a really bad pain in her back that she was convinced was a muscle pull. She has had good days, but her improvement is only slight and they could not figure out what was happening. Well, as of yesterday, we now know what is going on.

Jenny underwent CAT and PET Scans last week in order to see if there was any activity with the cancer. The results were, simply put, devastating. The cancer is not only active it’s progressive and starting to re-invade some of the area’s that the doctors had been able to shrink it away from, including her spinal column again. There are nodules on her lung that seem to be active and there is lymph node growth as well.

The word, direct from her oncologist, was that there is no possible treatment. There was supposed to be a meeting on Thursday, but since we essentially forced the teams hand when we began suspecting they were keeping something from us I am not sure that is going happen now. We have already started meeting with some of them, like palliative care and we will be meeting with the hospice coordinator tonight sometime. We have no timeline, and I am not sure I want one.

Right now it looks like she will be entering a palliative care program designed to make her as comfortable as possible and to deal with the inevitable emotional crisis. The decision made today is that she will try and come home for hospice care, staying here as long as we are able to care for her. There are some prerequisites that she will have to meet before that can come to pass. If she is unable to come home we will be placing her with one of Hospice facilities in the valley.
So there you have it.

Jenny has fought this fucking insidious disease for nearly four years, and according to the medical team that fight is nearing the end. Yesterday was the hardest day of my life. I am very angry at the way the doctors, including her brilliant oncologist, handled this thing. They have known this for some time, yet they hid it from us. The only reason we know now is because I caught some discrepancies in a report the rounding doctor gave us. Sharon and I called her primary oncologist and told him not to play games with us. He didn’t.

After finding out the truth, my next task was to tell Jennifer, because she had no idea. I am not even going to go into that. Suffice it to say that it was heartbreaking.

If anyone has questions or wished to speak with us just shoot me a message and I will give you my phone number if you do not already have it.

Jenny is resting as comfortable as possible. Her mental state is exactly what you might think, though she and her mother did discuss plans for after this is over. Jenny has expressed her wishes and we will follow them as best we can. When the time comes I will release those and advise everyone what follows.

Jenny has been a strong young lady for her entire life. She has battled and kept cancer at bay for longer than I thought possible, and she has done it with a sense of humor and a love of life that is astounding. Now that she is coming to the end of that battle I can only think of the strength and love she has shown us all. I will mourn, but I will also celebrate my daughter.

Well, I have not checked in in some time. So I thought I would drop by.

Things are going okay. We have stayed afloat, though we still can not seem to get on track. We have gotten everything caught up but utilities. I am currently trying to out together $200 so they do not shut me off tomorrow. Wish me luck!
 

Funny how things work. When I made my first post here I had reached the point that I no longer cared. I had went the route of what I saw as lowering and exposing myself to he pitfalls of internet begging and nothing had come of it. Too many people are in my position and too few people out there with the proper means care enough to step up and help a stranger who posts on the web. The fear of being scammed by someone simply looking for a free ride is too great. It makes the legit cases who do need help a secondary concern of that fear.

Since I "gave up" I have found a decent job and my landlord has decided to step up and write off rent for last month until I can get back on my feet. We are still struggling to get our utilities paid and there is little in the way of food in this house. But there is at least hope that if we can survive the next few weeks we will be okay. We are not facing eviction at any rate.

Hopefully we will see a miracle that helps us with food and utilities. I find it kind of iffy to pray for money, so I hope God is paying attention.

Keep your chins up. Things work out, though maybe not in ways we hope for or as fast. But one way or another, they do work out.

This is a scammer folks. Note the Gmail address and the "offer" of a "loan"?

Though most of you likely already know, it bears repeating.

Jenny's story was about to go national at the time these stories were written, but the toll all the attention put on her was too much and we kind of went reclusive. Had I let it happen, we may have gotten attention and assistance that would mean we would not be in the mess we are, and likely more in a position to help other cancer fighters, but I was more interested in her survival at the time.

http://www.azcentral.com/12news/news/articles/2009/03/20/20090320cancerphotogwebbonus-CR.html

http://www.azcentral.com/style/fashion/articles/2009/03/20/20090320photogirl0321.html

http://www.denverpost.com/frontpage/ci_11601804

The following is an article I wrote that was published on a small new site owned by my friend. I am positing it now because it will show people that despite the pain, the doubt, the fear and the finincial disaster that cancer can cuase there is still hope and inspiration in every story. We may not make it through this month financially, but I will never stop seeing the miracle in my daughter.There is much MUCH more to her story, though it would take more than one post to tell it.

In September 2007 my wife and I walked through the doors at St Joseph's hospital in Phoenix Arizona with trepidation. We were about to learn the results of tests done on a mass that was discovered in my daughter Jennifer's Chest and back while trying to determine why pneumonia treatments were ineffective .

What we were about to find out was the end game of a 4 day trial filled with a fear unlike anything we had ever known. 

Jennifer was 17 years old at the time and had been suffering with s strain of HPV which had manifested in her throat. No one has ever been able to tell us how she contracted the disease, but we do know that she was infected shortly after birth. The combination of treatments, surgery and scar tissue control destroyed her vocal chords and airway, ultimately doing enough damage that she ended up with a tracheal bypass at the age of 3 and lived with it for the next 13 years. The day she tube came out still stands as one of the most joyful of our lives.

I vividly remember walking out of the doctors office in dead silence. As much as she hated that tube and the limits it put on her life the simple truth was that it had been her lifeline for as long as she could remember. There was a strange sense of tension between us as we settled in the car and prepared to head home. I looked back at her and smiled, she smiled back and as if on queue she and her mother burst into tears. It was the ultimate expression of conflicting emotions, tears flowing over a smiling face, and I will remember the sense of hope and optimism we had that day.

Little did we know that less than a year later we would be making that walk into the hospital, and in the end walking into a new life.

We had an idea what we were about to be told. Realistically it could only be one thing, though we did our best to come up with alternative theories. In our minds we could not accept that a young girl who had gone through so much would have to endure an even harder and more devastating walk. God would not, could not allow such an unfair thing. So we naturally refused to accept the reality and substituted various of our own.

When we met with the doctor, a pediatric oncologist, he was blunt, so blunt that at the time I hated him for his seemingly heartless cruelty. He told us that Jennifer had a strain of cancer called Squamous cell Carcinoma and that it was malignant. We had more, even worse news coming, but our initial reaction was that we were the butt of a joke. My wife, who, either through shock or refusal to accept what she had just heard, misunderstood the meaning of the word malignant, and expressed this by placing her hand on her heart and thanking god. The oncologist, again in a blunt and cruel manner, told her that malignant was not a good thing.

I myself did all I could to get him to change his mind or admit that he was lying to us for some reason. In the end though we had no choice but to accept what we had just heard. We went outside and cried.

Over the next few days the news continued to get worse. Scans had shown that the cancer had done serious damage in its growth. Two ribs had been utterly destroyed on her right side, and one rib showed massive damage though it was still there. Three vertebra in her center back had been severely damaged to one degree or another and her lung was showing damage as well. The cancer had invaded her spinal column and was pushing against her spinal chord. Each report sent us further and further into despair, and while no one ever came out and said it we were convinced we were spending our last days with our daughter.

The doctors and nurses did little to help that feeling, though they did their best to stay positive. Jenny was fitted with a body brace that she would be forced to wear anytime she went into public. Treatments began at once and in an aggressive manner. Initially it was standard radiation treatments followed by cyberknife and chemo. Surgery was out of the question because the tumor was too close to her heart, lungs, and was wrapped around her spine. There was a sense of urgency, but no palpable sense of hope. The wait began, and while it was never characterized as a death watch there were times when it did take on that feeling.

The following months were strange. We had decided that we would not show despair or hopelessness in the face of this thing. When Jennifer was still in the hospital we instituted a new rule for our family that stated essentially, if you can not say it with laughter then do not say it. Obviously that is not always possible, but we did our best and it served us well. The darkness was always there, just under the surface but for the most part, in the beginning, the light never vanished.

It has been nearly three years since the journey started and I am happy to say that Jennifer is still with us and stronger than she has been in a very long time. Though not in traditional remission the cancer is not as active as it once was. She just finished her second round of chemo last month, and though there have been a few setbacks overall she is doing better than anyone ever expected. The aggressive treatments paid dividends early on when the cancerous fingers that had invaded her spinal chord pulled back and a majority of the overall mass liquified. There is healthy growth in her lung tissue and beyond all reason the bone damage seems to be repairing itself. There is still a very long and painful process ahead of us and nothing is set in stone. But as of this writing I am comfortable in stating that my daughter is a functioning cancer survivor.

Jenny's story only begins with what I just related. It is easy for someone who has never known someone with cancer to read about treatments and success and never know the reality behind it all. In Jenny's case, for every scrap of good news there was devastation to match it. After her first round of radiation and chemo the cancer went inactive. Six months later it was back and more aggressive. treatments made her so ill that she dropped under 100 lbs at one point, and mistakes made by nursing staff pushed her to the point of hallucination twice. As time wore on and the life of a cancer patient undergoing treatment began to reveal itself we needed intervention numerous times to prevent Jennifer from taking her own life.

As a family the struggle is different, but just as real. You battle with hope daily, never wanting to lose it but at the same time you try not to indulge it either. Our fear was that we would start to relax and get blindsided, so we strangely tried to find a balance between the optimism of wanting this to be okay and the pessimism of knowing what might happen. What we discovered is that you can not live your life based on a worst case scenario. This lesson manifested itself in two ways. First by nearly destroying our family, next by re-introducing us to God, and last by bringing us to the point of losing it all again because we, in our impatience, abandoned that same God.

You see, I decided to write this article not as a means of depressing people. I wrote it because underneath all the events of the last three years there is a truth that is hard to miss, but easy to ignore in favor of pain and anger. That truth is that miracles are not always what we expect. I am not a good Christian. I have fought with faith for many years, sometimes giving in to what I saw as the control of the spirit, other times slipping back to my agnostic days and despising God for allowing this unfair trial in my life. The upshot is that I missed a miracle that should have lead me to the truth inherent in the human condition. Instead I allowed it to lead me to near ruin.

If you read through the story above there is no doubt that you were thinking that after all that damage to her young body there is no way Jennifer would be able to lead a normal life. You are correct, she goes through things no young person should have to.

The consensus amongst her doctors is that the cancer had been growing in her body for years. In that time, as it destroyed her bone structure, Jennifer was an active and daring kid. She was in extreme dance classes and loved amusement parks and riding in anything fast. She wrestled with her brothers and did all sorts of things that we look back on now and cringe. Obviously not knowing what was growing in her means we could not know the potential damage it was doing, but hindsight can be cruel even if fault can not be laid at your feet.

Despite the damage to her body Jenny has never been in any serious pain as it relates to the cancer itself. After six months of wearing a body brace she got tired of it and refused to put it on anymore, disregarding medical advice and the fear of spinal collapse. In that time she has fallen numerous times and been in one car accident with no obvious impact. She even dances from time to time, swims, lays pool and bowls. She also does some alarming things in relation to her new love, photography, to get images she wants. Things that make me bite my lip in fear.

On top of that is the success of the treatments to this point. No one really thought she would survive this long, to say nothing of walking and doing all the other things she does. The tumor has shrunk in size and shows less activity than ever and she is healing.

Through all of this she has been the one to maintain the family. Upon learning she had cancer her first thoughts expressed fear over how we, her family, would survive her possible death. I for one would not expect a 17 year old child to ignore what such news meant for her in favor of what it meant to everyone else, but she did. This after a lifetime of illness that had just culminated in a slow death sentence. It was astounding.

Since then, with the exception of a few bad days, Jenny has not faltered. Through the financial problems we face to this day, the anger and the sometimes overwhelming desire to give up she has remained the example of strength and hope that we inevitable look to when things are at their worst.

The miracle that God is working within my daughter is not the kind of miracle that we look for every day. We are taught that miracles are good things that come to people in the most unexpected ways. We have a tendency though to see only the end result when a miracle happens and seldom understand that such a thing only happens after walking through darkness. What I have discovered, almost too late, is that gods works can be easy to ignore in that same darkness.

Though his hand has been on her since the beginning sometimes it is difficult to see it through scans and x-rays that are a constant reminder of what is happening to her. It is easy to miss Godliness when one is spending all their time asking how god could allow such a thing to happen. In my case I spent too much time blaming God, and demanding restitution for doing what he did to my life. In that, I missed the truth. I missed Gods message.

Jennifer, by her very existence, is a miracle.

Well, I have a scammer on the hook right now. I will update my blog on the details and outcome later, but this looks like a domestic attempt, and a not very smart one at that.

Well, I have the base design and master CSS written and up. Now I just have to figure out how I want to transition the pages and what kind of bells and whistles I want to use.

You can check out the progress at http://www.zoesterimages.com/

It is going to and up as a really simple but elegant design. Let me know what you think...lol..hurt me.

When it is done I may have a surprise for everyone. I am working on something that my get some real publicity for aid pages.

Thanks!

The unfortunate thing is that there are many people out there who fall for these scams. Desperation can sometimes breed ignorance and push a person beyond what would normally be common sense and common caution. Scammers prey on this desperation. It makes little sense to me that the poor would make good targets for those animals, but that is the case. The more people know what to look for, the more likely they will not take that one chance, hoping for a miracle, only to end up in a worse position than before.

I wish I could help you with more than mere words but I am in a position very much like yours. There are wonderful people here with ideas and links to resources that you may be able to tap and find some relief.

What I can offer is a kind word or two. My wife and I have had some serious problems since our finances went south. The stress or medical bills on top of normal bills was bad enough when we were doing well. When things started to fall apart you can imagine how much worse they became.We have been on the edge of seperation for a long time. 

Thing is, as bad as things get you must know that there are people out there who care.Even coming to a place like this, if only to make sure you are not alone, can help. And you are not alone. You are part of a circle of true humans that are learning that they can survive darkness, though that lesson is sometimes hard to see through the fear and frustration.

You will be in my thoughts and my prayers. If means come my way I will assist you as I can.

I like being busy. I have been unemployed for a little over 6 weeks now, so I have plenty of time on my hands. I hate boredom :D

Just so you know, I tried Microgiving a while back when things started to go bad. Of all the sites I tried that one was the best. I was able to generate about $100 and it helped at that time. But as with most places there are so many people that need legit help and so few that are in a position to offer it that getting needs filled is a longshot. I love that place though, and the people were kind and giving. I canceled my account there not long ago.

In a way, I think part of the problem is that I am a father, with a family that is and always has been together. There seems to be a reluctance to commit aid to someone like me because of the social belief that a "real" man takes care of his family, even if there is a very real need. A single mother with a few children sparks more compassion, and for good reason. I do not resent this, I simply believe that it is what it is.

Things work out. I came here to essentially say that I was done and found that I was just beginning. Links and encouragement that I have recieved from just one person have sparked a bit of hope in me. I am no longer going to waste my time actively seeking aid. It has been humiliating to put myself out there like that. In any case it is too late as things start coming to an end this week. Alas, I will put my faith in God that he will show me a way. We need too much money, about $1200, to survive the month and it is a bit of a pipedream to think that people would be willing to make that leap for a stranger.

 I am currently writing an online "book" that is a sometimes humorous look at what it is like to be the father of a cancer patient. I will post a link when it is done.

 Also, I am curently working on my daughters website. She is an aspiring Photographer, and though we can not afford to persue it 100% at this time she has done some great things. You can see her site at http://www.zoesterimages.com. The gallery should be up soon, so keep checking in!

Dont give up hope! You never know when God is going to change your life.

It is an ugly truth that this kind of plea for help can sometimes generate unwanted attention, from less than decent people. In the last week I have posted on two Help sites and all it has generated is scam attempts. It has been very frustrating, but it has taught me a few things. First, there are very few people out there willing and/or capable of helping a total stranger who posts a plea on a website. Second, there are thousands of people out there cold hearted enough to try and scam the poor and desperate. It's sick.

I have a 20 year old daughter who has a nasty form of cancer. She has undergone various forms of treatment and has fought it for 3 years. That, combined with the terrible economy and even worse jobs availability in my field has hurt us badly. We have been able to fight off the final blow for some time, but we have reached it now. We have no food in the house, are about to have our utilities shit off and after the first we face eviction.

I court ridicule and laughter from my family by seeking aid online using begging sites, but I felt I had no choice. The upshot of it all was that I ended up being ridiculed and given false hope by scammers. I opened myself up to this obviously, but it is still frustrating. I have givin up all hope of charity coming our way, and I am preparing myself for a very bad time. But there is something I can offer the legit aid seekers out there.

Please, be careful who you treat with when going after any offer that comes your way. If someone offers you help via email that should be the first red flag. Most donors are not going to contact you prior to giving you that donation. There are some that may however, so here is what to look for when it happens.

Bad spelling and phrasing in the body of the email It usually starts with an strange endearment like "Hello Dearest" or the like. Phrasing looks as though it were put through a translation site.

A free service email address. Anyone actually speaking for a church or charity is unlikey to have a gmail or Yahoo email address. If the person contacting you is not doing so from a organizational email address it is a scam. You can also look at the email header and see what the "Recieved From" IP address is and run it through a whois service. Even if they are using a free email address the IP will still be recorded. Of the 20 or so emails I have had offering help all but one originated in Lagos Nigeria.

Anyone who askes you to pucrhase equipment as a way of getting started, askes for a processing fee or wants you to distribute a portion of your funds is a scammer. Legit donors will never ask you for these things. 

Never give out personal info, especially bank accounts or passwords and think twice about giving out your address. If the person will not use Paypal you are likely getting scammed.

Be careful. These scams will not only cause you further money problems, but some can even end with YOU in legal trouble.