Jake Murphy Caring for Jake Murphy

Our son Jake is 18 years old and was recently diagnosed with brain cancer called Gliomatosis Cerebri. We thought we had a normal healthy young man on the verge of entering the military after graduating from high school in May of 2020. On September 30th we found out that was not the case. Jake had been suffering from headaches most of the summer, but due to the COVID-19 pandemic, we just brushed it off as a common headache treated with Tylenol and rest. He started experiencing double vision in the middle of September and decided something was really wrong. The hospital did a CT scan and told us he had a golf ball size mass on the scan and he needed to be referred to a neurosurgeon. We immediately scheduled the appointment and had an MRI scan that showed what we thought was only in nightmares. The golf ball size mass that we thought could just be removed was in fact a very substantial brain tumor that encompassed the whole right side of his brain and some of the left cerebral cortex. We had a biopsy completed 2 days after the initial appointment with the Neurosurgeon and during recovery had a meeting with an Oncologist. She stated that Jake had a very aggressive type of tumor that needed to be treated with radiation and chemotherapy IMMEDIATELY. We decided to meet with the Cancer specialists at Emory in Atlanta, GA to discuss different treatment options. Emory University Hospital is the only facility in the state of Georgia that offers Proton Radiation therapy, and they seemed to really have an optimistic outlook on the outcomes of his treatment plan. We started this journey a little bit over 2 months ago, and are still in the very early stages of his treatment, but we can already see that his treatment has been very costly. His medical bills have already been very extensive due to cancer medications, radiation treatments and hospital visits. We have to care for our son, Jake around the clock due to his not being able to move the left side of his body from the brain tumor. Jake is unable to walk or even sit up without help.