FUNDING THE FIGHT
Friends rally to help woman with cancer
In the backs of their minds, they thought it might be cancer — but you’re never fully prepared to actually hear it, Sherri Oldham says.
“I ended up having to leave the room. I was hyperventilating.”
The 23-year-old woman who had received the diagnosis, however, found she could finally take a deep breath and get ready to start her journey.
“It was kind of nice to put a name to it,” Kaitlyn Craig said in a phone interview from Royal University Hospital.
Craig started feeling ill in early January after she moved back into Camp Kadesh in Christopher Lake to help with school groups.
“I’d get really short of breath just walking up stairs. Being a very active person it was very out of the blue that something like that would take me out for a couple minutes,” Craig said.
Oldham, a director at the camp, has only known Craig for a year, but they became close friends after Craig started working there last summer.
Craig, originally from Calgary, is a strong, vibrant and active young woman who is always smiling, Oldham said.
“She’s been through a lot and always can try to look on the bright side.”
In February, after a series of Xrays, CT scans and ultrasounds, as the pain spread and she lost her appetite and her arm started going numb, a biopsy revealed cancer in her lungs, pancreas and liver.
The fast-spreading disease is at a palliative state, which means there’s no cure. Chemotherapy can only slow it down.
Doctors haven’t been able to figure out where the cancer started, which means they can’t even target it with the proper chemotherapy.
Still, Craig had her first trial-and-error dose last Saturday and gets her next one today. She is also due for another blood transfusion.
“I stay hopeful in the fact that even though I don’t know the outcome, I know that it’s already been decided and that God has got this journey before me and He’s with me every poke of every needle and every test, every doctor appointment,” she said.
“It’s definitely not my strength getting through this — I would have tuckered out a long time ago.”
Oldham has created gofundme. com page to support Craig financially.
Craig has had to drop out of her social work program, but she still has fees to pay, and she doesn’t have a drug plan.
As of Friday, 128 people had donated more than $10,000.
“I’m just overwhelmed and so thankful with the amount of people who stepped up and just saw the need that I couldn’t meet,” Craig said.
“It’s a great community from camp friends and family and really the whole country, because it’s spread pretty far.”
I stay hopeful in the fact that even though I don’t know the outcome, I know that it’s already been decided.