John Yeagle

Welcome to our CaringBridge website. We are using it to keep family and friends updated in one place. We appreciate your support and words of hope and encouragement. This website will be monitored by Jake's children, Autumn, Sequoya and Hunter. If you have questions or would like to connect with us directly, please reach out to autumn.hassett@gmail.com. Thank you for visiting.

As many of you know, my dad was diagnosed with stage 3 lung cancer in October of 2016. After some treatments, his cancer was almost in remission, in the spring of 2017. 

My dad continued to be in discomfort, mostly related to breathing, so he opted for a procedure to help with the pain around Labor Day, 2017. After the surgery, new cancer nodules were discovered and so my dad continued to seek treatment with his oncologist team. 

Over the fall, the cancer has continued to spread to stage 4, despite radiation and chemotherapy efforts. My dad also tried an immunotherapy treatment, to which he had a bad reaction too. In addition to the cancer spreading, my dad's breathing has become even more comprised, resulting in him being dependent on oxygen. 

Since Thanksgiving, my dad has been hospitalized multiple times due to breathing complications and discomfort. He has been seeing doctors at LVH and UPenn, and both care teams have been working together to treat this awful disease. He was most recently hospitalized at LVH, released on Christmas Eve, and was rushed back to the ER on January 2nd, 2018. My dad was then admitted to the ICU. 

At this point, because the cancer has spread so aggressively and due to the oxygen requirements my dad is on, there are not cancer or additional breathing treatments available. Our aim in all of this is to make sure my dad is comfortable. We will be arranging for in-home hospice care to start once my dad is released from LVH, likely next week. With that being said, we will need some help from our village to ensure my dad can be well taken care of at home, and to help my mom. 

We'll be posting updates and details about some things that could help, but this is all new to us, so please feel free to contact me if you feel like there are other things we need to think about. We all believe in miracles and we're hopeful that with my dad being at home and relaxing, he will be able to get stronger and hopefully continue in his fight. 

Thank you all for reading this and love to you all,
Autumn