This blog is to provide information for the Zumbathon to raise money for the Bryan & Aleta Young Family. Here is some background information regarding Holland (their 3 year old daughter) and her story thus far.
In December 2012
this article was written for Holland:
Since this article was written, things have changed. The tumor has now mutated.
Holland was originally diagnosed with a Juvenile Pilocytic Astrocytoma, which was completely resected in August after 4 surgeries. The problem was that even if just a few cells were left, there's a chance that the tumor can grow back, which it did and it mutated to a Pilomyxoid Astrocytoma (or from a grade 1 to a grade 2 tumor). It's still considered a benign tumor, but with how quickly it grew back (3 1/2 months) and how aggressively it grew, the neurosurgeon recommended chemotherapy after her 5th surgery in December to wipe out any few cells that might have been leftover.
Since more surgeries can't be done,(there's quite a bit of scar tissue now) and there's obviously no such thing as a brain transplant. After Holland's 5th surgery she also developed hydrocephalus, probably as a result of too much blood in her cerebral fluid from 5 surgeries in 7 months. January brought surgery #6 to place a shunt in Holland's brain to fix the hydrocephalus and place a central line in for the chemo treatments.
The treatments were once a week for the first 4 weeks and are now once every 4 weeks for a year, with MRI scans every 3 months to make sure there's no tumor growth. Although, the Young's hopeful that they will only have to do it for 6 months.
Chemotherapy brings a whole slew of side effects, some of which may or may not be permanent, and the Young's have been trying to creatively figure out how to handle them. The social worker assigned to the Young family told them that "chemo is like a running marathon." In the words of Aleta, ..."running a marathon has always sounded positively horrible to me, so the quicker this year goes by, the better!"
To top it all off, since there is an extra 2% being taken out of Bryan's paycheck from the tax cuts expiring, it means less money for the Young family, AND they just found out that their out-of-pocket maximum increased $1000 from last year. However, Bryan doesn't get a raise every year like he should because the pay steps are frozen for the school district. And Holland's medical bills are more than 10% of Bryan's gross income.
