As some of you know, my girlfriend Dev has been on chemo since November. As you can imagine, the expenses involved in going to the hospital twice a month (2hrs away), parking while at the hospital ($20/day), and the co-pay on her neulasta shots have began to rack up. A local group have offered to put on a benefit show in order to help cover some of these costs. As an added bonus, Black Bear Performance has offered to donate a portion of their proceeds from Sunday, March 29th through Thursday April 2nd to Dev's cause!! If you've been contemplating getting a tune, now is the time to do so! This offer is good on all tunes: traditional/cable/in-person! If you have any questions, feel free to PM me or to email Jenna at jenna@blackbearperformance.com

Also, any of you that are local, feel free to come out and support her! If any of you care to support her but wont be able to attend, PM me about details.

Thanks again for all of the love and support that many of you have shown us through this entire ordeal! It means so much!




On March 9, 2006, I went to the doctor because I had been gaining weight, my stomach was very swollen, and I had been feeling nauseous. They did a lot of tests and thought maybe I had a blockage. My doctor wanted to send me to Conway Medical Center for an ultrasound and CT scan just to make sure. Thank goodness he did beccause what they found was much more than a blockage. I had a large tumor growing across my abdomen, filling up the entire space from my diaphraghm to my ovaries. I was immediately sent to MUSC and set up for emergency surgery the next morning. After six hours of surgery, the tumor was finally removed. It weighed thirteen pounds. My surgeon was concerned that this was not just a spontaneous tumor. He thought I had a genetic condition known as Gardner's Syndrome, and a blood test confirmed that this is indeed what I had. Basically, Gardner's Syndrome causes people to grow a large amount of polyps in their stomach and colon and if left untreated, they will become cancerous. Every six months, I was undergoing upper and lower GI's to check for polyps. My mom even took me to Houston, Texas where she found the guy who REALLY knew what he was doing! His father found the gene that my condition is located on. I made two trips to Texas and November 2008 would have been my next one. As irony would have it, on November 19, 2008, I started experiencing horrible stomach pains after eating lunch at school. I was attending the College of Charleston, so after lunch, I went back to my dorm room to rest. I tried to take pain medication to aleviate the pain, but nothing worked. The pain only worsened. Around 2 the next morning, I woke up and made my way to the bathroom and threw up. I went back to bed thinking maybe that would make everything better. I was wrong. I woke up two hours later, throwing up again. That's when I knew something was wrong. I threw up a total of four times before I called my mom and told her I needed help. I called an ambulance to come get me from my dorm room, since I could not make it down the street to my car to drive myself to the hospital. When I arrived at the emergency room at MUSC, they did all the usual poking and proding. They took me down for a CT scan and found two tumors. These tumors, unlike the last one, were not operable. They were both growing on blood vessels. One on blood vessels to my spleen, the other to blood vessels in my intestines. Because the operation would be too risky, they resorted to six treatments of chemotherapy. There is a 70-80% chance this type of chemotherapy will resolve the tumors.

 

Its for a great cause people! help her out! I know both coop and devin well and, as the saying goes, the worst stuff happens to the best people, and its 100% true in her case. She is one of the absolute sweetest girls ive met.

 

Matt is always there for folks when they have questions/issues with their trucks, let's help a fellow enthusiast!

 

Matt, check your Paypal.
She will be in my prayers.

Best of luck to you both,
Derek

 

Derek, thank you very much! If I can ever do anything for you, let me know! Thanks for the prayers!

 

Here's a photo from a few weeks back when we were in the hospital. I felt it was fitting for this thread!

 

TTT! Thanks for those of you who have been spreading the word!

 

Post up your paypal address.

 

+1 post up your paypal, i would be more than happy to make a donation.

 

the paypal addy is mattcoop@sccoast.net I didn't post the address up at first because I didn't want this to come off the wrong way.

thanks for the support guys! please continue to help spread the word about the tunes this week!