I am excited to join hands with Pedal The Cause again this year to continue the fight against cancer. This awful disease struck my family in a very big way. In October of 2021 my husband Kyle was diagnosed with stage 4 pancreatic cancer. At the time we had a 4 year old, 2 year old and an 11 month old. How could this be? We just started our family. This wasn’t what we planned. They weren’t giving us much hope either. All but 1 doctor was ready to put Kyle on hospice. Little did we know, Dr Kian Lim agreed to take on Kyle’s complex case and give him another shot at life. Because of him, we received 17 more months with Kyle. After 5 months of standard chemotherapy, Kyle was blessed to receive a treatment Dr Kian Lim and his team had been working on for years. Kyle was patient 1. Literally the only human to have this treatment in his body. I believed from the start we would get a miracle, and that we did. Kyle battled courageously for 12 more long hard months. His tumor marker continued to plummet all the way to “non active” after 9 months of this novel treatment. He ended up passing April 3rd, 2023 due to complications caused by the rigorous treatment needed before he was eligible for the study. THIS is why I continue to fight. If Kyle had received the experimental treatment from when he was first diagnosed, I strongly believe he would still be here. And so would many many others. The reason this treatment wasn’t and still isn’t readily available is funding. Cancer research funding is scarce. The FDA is the #1 largest funding source for cancer research. The problem is, it’s no where near enough. Less than 1% of the governments funding goes to cancer research. I recently went to Washington, DC to talk with members of Congress about the need for more cancer funding. I left feeling discouraged and frustrated. We CANNOT rely on the government to fund our treatments. I say OUR treatments as 1 in 2 people will personally be affected by cancer. I lost my husband, my babies lost their father and there are millions of other stories just like ours.
This year I’m thrilled to share one of my very closest friends and I have decided to join together to bring more awareness and much needed funded to GI cancers! She is living proof! At the very young age of 31, she was diagnosed with stage 3b colorectal cancer. I watched as she battled cancer gracefully while continuing to teaching fitness classes and work as an attorney for a Supreme Court judge. She was and still is a force. I am honored to call her one of my closest friends and supporter in life. She beat her cancer a year before Kyle was diagnosed. Never did I ever think she would then be supporting me and my family through our cancer battle just a short time later. Now, here we are almost an exact year after my late husband passed and nearly 4 years post cancer for her, ready to take on pedal 2024 as a team. Ready to raise as much awareness and funding as possible. Join us on our mission!!! TEAM KYLE 2024!!!
