All Lauren Ever Wanted Was to Be Sloan's Mom. Sloan is twenty-two months old. She weighs about thirty pounds now. For the next six months, her mother is not allowed to pick her up.

That's the sentence I keep getting stuck on.

My name is Daniel. Lauren is my wife of eleven years this August. Two weeks ago, surgeons at OHSU removed a tumor from her brain. The diagnosis is glioblastoma, a grade 4 brain cancer, the most aggressive there is. It is considered terminal, with most prognoses measured in 1–5 years. She came through surgery with the same steadiness she's brought to everything in our life together. Now comes chemo, radiation, and a long road we are just beginning to understand.

I need to tell you who Lauren is. For most of our marriage I was gone: The Special Forces Qualification Course, four deployments as a Green Beret, several of them extended. Lauren held our entire life together from home, never once making me feel the weight of it. We tried for years to have a child, through IVF and through loss, before Sloan arrived.  All Lauren ever wanted was to be a mother. Twenty-two months ago she became one. 

The thing we are fighting for now is simple: enough time, and good enough days, that Sloan grows up remembering her mom, not from my stories, but from her own memories.

Here is the practical reality. Insurance covers the surgery, the scans, the chemo. It does not cover the part that is quietly breaking us. Lauren cannot work, drive, or lift more than eight pounds for the next six months, Sloan weighs thirty. We need a caregiver with the right training to help with Lauren's bedside care, drive her to appointments, keep them tracked, and help with Sloan so I can keep working and keep us afloat. In our area that runs roughly $80,000–$90,000 a year. 

The conservative total for the road ahead: care, treatment, travel, lodging, prescriptions, daily life is around $250,000.

I've spent my career showing up for other people, in uniform and through the work I do for the special operations community as the founder of the Special Operations Association of America. This is the first time in my life I've had to ask anyone to show up for us. I'm not good at it. But I won't let my pride cost Lauren a single day with our daughter.

If you can give, it goes directly toward that care. If you can't, your prayers and your willingness to share this mean just as much. We've been carried this far by people willing to show up. I will never be able to fully say what that has meant.

Lauren's care is moving to Johns Hopkins, with Duke being engaged for clinical trials.

— Daniel

Please note: Donations made through this campaign support Special Forces Trust programs that assist families facing circumstances similar to the Elkins family's, including Beyond the Battlefield's Sponsored Treatments & Services and Tragedy Assistance programs. Contributions are tax-deductible to the extent permitted by law and are administered in accordance with SFT's charitable mission. EIN: 27-4209721