Good Evening Everyone

Today was the big day! I finally decided to join Steemit and to do my #introducemyself post. So first, a little about me. I am, more than anything, a family man. I have been married to my high school sweetheart for 10 years and we have 3 amazing children. The picture above is from Big E's 5th birthday, and coincidentally, he turned 8 today. Yup, that's my family, and as you can see, my wife always goes above and beyond for any parties or get togethers because that is one of her favorite things to do. Together, we have done amazing things as a team, but unfortunately our toughest work is ahead of us, more on that later :(

Yes, I actually mined Bitcoin with CPUs

I have been around the crypto scene for quite some time. Through the good times and the bad. I took a serious hit back when the now infamous Josh Garza created one of the biggest Ponzi schemes that we have seen. This took a serious toll on me, but I came out of it a better person and learned from the mistakes I made. I firmly believe that we are still in the infancy of Cryptos and blockchain technologies, and that we as a whole are going to change the world.
Lately I have gotten much enjoyment out of booting up all my old computers and digging through hundreds of old wallets. Some of these were gems, but there are many that were either dead coins or that I had emptied because of my lack of patience - another mistake that I had to learn from. (kind of like when I sold all my cpu mined bitcoin for $20 each - beats 10k for a pizza I guess)

Our World Rocked

The following is from a blog that I am working on to detail our journey:

On March 27 of this year, Corrie, my beautiful wife, best friend, and mother to our 3 amazing children underwent surgery to remove a painful "lipoma" from her lower back that had been bothering her for 2 years +. This surgery was expected to take less than an hour, and when I didn't hear anything for over 2 hours, I knew something was wrong. Though they didn't know much at the time, the Surgeon had noticed that the mass did not look normal, so she took extra precaution in removing it. Following the surgery, they told us that it looked odd and that they would know more following the pathology reports.

While waiting for results, the anxiety was overwhelming. Through communications with our doctor, they told us that the pathology was unidentified at 2 labs, and had been sent to The Cleveland Clinic for further investigation. We had discussed together numerous times about what could be taking so long and as I tried to remain positive and keep her in good spirits, she kept telling me that she had a gut feeling that she knew what it was. On April 27, Corrie got the call that her results were in and headed over to the clinic to meet with the Doctor.

She messaged me after she had gone into the exam room that they needed to retake her blood pressure and pulse because her stress had escalated those both dramatically. Now I knew she would be finding out so I headed to our bedroom to pray and hope that her tests were negative for cancer. After about an hour, I sent a text wondering if she was still with the Doctor, and she called me back informing me that our worst fears had become reality.

Our diagnosis was Sclerosing epithelioid fibrosarcoma (SEF), one of the rarest forms of sarcoma. Had this been caught in time, surgery and a bit of radiation would have us on the track to being disease free. But the problem with SEF is that even though it is slow growing, it is very aggressive. After numerous scans had been performed, the diagnosis was changed from a stage 1 cancer to stage 4 because it had metastasized to her lungs. Our hearts were broken. For the first couple days/weeks we had many breakdowns. Intermittent tears streaming at the slightest thought. It was so hard for her to try to see a future, and it was unimaginable to me that she might not be here to help raise and enjoy our children.

We began a diligent regiment of research which included internet searches, reaching out to others who have the same or a similar disease, and also second opinions. After all of our research thus far, one thing is pretty clear. Chemotherapy is very ineffective for this particular sarcoma. The typical way to treat it is to intermittently scan for tumors and to remove them when they appear. Yes, this was an option, but the systemic risk was still imminent, and this solution only seems to buy time.

In a random encounter in a Facebook Sarcoma group, my wife encountered a man who had been dealing with this same diagnosis for a couple years and was now enrolled in an immunotherapy trial in Miami, FL. After many different kinds of treatments, "Bob" had never had much success except for surgically removing tumors. But this treatment was different. "Bob" spoke of watching the tumors basically melt away in a series of scans over a 12 week period. The immunotherapy in this trial uses your immune system to fight off the tumors, and not only "Bob", but many others told of this same situation. The tumors, previously unaffected by other treatments, were being removed from the body by the body.

After reaching out to the many different people, contacting the clinic in Miami, and having our new Doctor follow up with that Clinic, we got a call back last week telling us that the Doctor in Miami would like to treat my wife with the immunotherapy whether she qualifies for the trial or not. (The trial typically had been used as a 2nd or 3rd treatment option, but this Doctor believes that it should be the first line of attack) We scheduled our appointment, and immediately bought our airplane tickets and reserved our hotel room. WE ARE GOING TO MIAMI

LONG LONG POST

Yes, I know..... but I hope you bared with me. I want to keep everyone updated, to get a blog going, and to share our journey as our family teams up to beat this thing together. Thank you all for reading.