El Teamo Chemo

Hello!

Thank you so much for checking out my Angel Walk page. Hopefully you will find it in your heart to make a charitable donation to my current care provider and organizers of the event - the Preston Robert Tisch Brain Tumor Center at Duke University Medical Center.

As you may or may not know, I've been battling a grade 2 brain tumor for about 9 years. It was easy going at first - "watch and wait" with MRIs every 6 months for 5 years. But in 2008, seizures began. Given the onset of seizure activity, after more testing and scans, I eventually had brain surgery in March of 2009. I had severe left-side paralysis and spent a few months in physical therapy to learn to walk and use my left arm and hand again. My seizures continued, and I've been on two anti-seizure meds for 3+ years.

In April, 2011, the remaining tumor tissue appeared to be continuing to grow. By August this was confirmed by both Johns Hopkins and Duke. By January, 2012, the growth appeared to be increasing in speed, although my tumor grade hasn't officially changed to a 3 (yet?). It was time to act again.

In February I started daily dosing of chemotherapy to hopefully stop the growth and perhaps even shrink the tumor tissue. So far, I feel fine and my blood work has been normal - 11 more months to go.

Blair and I have just registered for the annual "Angels Among Us" 5K/Walk at the end of April. I still can't run much more than a few awkward steps, so I have to elect to walk in the event. The walk is about 2.2 miles and we hope you will help us meet our goal of $4,000, all of which goes to the Duke Brain Tumor Center for research in all areas of brain tumors, brain cancer, treatment, advances, etc.

On this page/website, you can donate online via a secure credit card transaction or by mailing a check. Hoping to keep a sense of humor with our continued fight, we named our team "El Teamo Chemo". Be sure and donate to the correct team if you do choose to help us out!

Thank you so much for your time and (hopefully) donation. Our goal progress is automatically tracked and visible on this site. I will also certainly provide updates via this page.

Thanks!

Mark (and my lovely, endlessly supportive wife and teammate, Blair)

P.S. If you have trouble with this site, try using Internet Explorer as your browser. I normally use Google Chrome, but saw some weirdness that went away when I used IE (I did not try Firefox).