Cutchogue Mom Facing Cancer Turns to Internet To Raise Funds

Only 29 years old, Cutchogue resident  and single mom Elizabeth Toy is facing the most terrifying spectre a parent can imagine: The fear that she might not live to see her son Matthew, 11, grow up.

Toy, who has Hodgkin's lymphoma, a cancer that spreads through the lymph nodes, was first diagnosed in 2010. She is in need of a bone marrow stem cell transplant and the miracle, she said, is that doctors believe a donor match has been found.

But despite the good news, Toy is burdened with worry and buried beneath financial woes. Despite her illness, Toy has had to continue to work to pay her rent and provide for her son.

Now, she is beginning a aggressive chemotherapy before the transplant, which will require a 30 to 45 day stay in the hospital, followed by a 100 to 160 day period of isolation to prevent infection. The possibility of graft versus host disease exists, she said, which will mean even further hospitalization.

Over the past months, Toy has endured six different courses of chemotherapy, radiation, a bone procedure where cancer was removed and replaced with cement, and an auto stem cell transplant, which failed. 

Next, Toy began a trial drug, with the hope of preparing her for the next transplant.

But throughout her medical ordeal, Toy has worried endlessly about paying the rent and utility bills, which have fallen behind.

To that end, she has turned to Go Fund Me, an online website for raising funds through donations. Through her appeal, she has raised $1,915 of her $10,000 goal.

"I am struggling against all odds," she wrote on the Go Fund Me website. "I am a single parent who lost my fiance, our only son's father, to deportation in 2009. I was diagnosed with cancer just a year later."

According to her plea, Toy does not receive rental assistance due to the fact "waiting lists are always full or closed."

Toy said along with limited disability benefits of $427 per month, she has continue to work, at East End Nephrology in Greenport, against doctor's orders.

"I am forced to work sick, oftentimes running to the bathroom to vomit, fighting off shakes and barreling through fatigue against doctor's orders, and putting myself in danger . . . just to make rent, which is $1000 a month, utilities not included," she wrote.

Throughout her struggle, Toy said, she remains focused on staying alive for her son. "My son is so important to me," she said.  "I truly am all he has."

In the past, friends raised funds locally in a trust set up at Suffolk County National Bank in Cutchogue through an account called the "Support Elizabeth Toy Fund" which is still in place, she said.

Funds, however, Toy said, have been depleted. "I cannot come so far and go through all this to lose everything when I come home," she wrote on the Go Fund Me site. "I will be out of work and in need of help to supplement my rent, utilities and transportation, and child care for six months total, including the transplant itself," she said. "I promised my son Matthew I would never give up, that I would work as hard as I could to push through this and come out on top. Please help me keep my promise to my little boy. He, too, has lost so much, and I don't want him to lose the stability of the home we have built together."

Toy said a solution could be found, if she were deemed eligbile to receive assistance through Section 8 housing assistance, but she has been told the waiting list is five years' long.

"There's no hope for me out there," Toy said. 

If she were to receive Section 8 housing assistance, she said, "It would make things so much easier. I wouldn't have to go through this process of begging people to help me. It's humiliating, and it's humbling. I hope no one ever has to be in this situation."

Even more frightening than facing cancer, Toy said, is the thought of leaving her son without his mother. "It's the worst nightmare a parent can ever think of," she said. "If I pass away, his father is not in the picture. He would be an orphan."

Her son, she said, is her biggest support and champion. "I told him, 'We don't know what the outcome is going to be, but I'm going to give it my best shot. No matter what I have to go through, I'm doing it for you."

Toy said she was livid when she read about another woman claiming to have had cancer and trying to raise funds online; the plea was a scam and the woman, addicted to heroin. "When people are out there scamming, it takes credibility away from people like me, people who are sick and can use help," she said.

Still, Toy said, she is grateful for donations she has received so far; at least two months' rent can be paid with what caring friends and residents have already contributed.

Despite trying to remain optimistic, Toy cries as she speaks of her son. "I don't want my son to have to bury me, and I don't want my mom to have to bury a second child," she said.

Toy lost a brother recently, she said.

Even if the transplant doesn't work, she prays for the hope of another trial drug.

"Maybe it will buy me a little more time," she said. "Precious time, that I can have with my son, to teach him all I want to teach him in an entire lifetime. I have to pack it all in."

Toy's primary care doctor, Blaise Napolitano of Hudson River Healthcare, Inc. in Greenport, said she has had multiple rounds of chemotherapy and radiation, but her body hasn't responded. The bone marrow transplant, he said, is critical.

"She's very nice," he said. "So very young -- a very nice young woman. It's a really sad story. A really sad case." 

What makes her struggle even more difficult, Toy said, is that from the outside she doesn't "look like a cancer patient. People don't realize how sick I am. They see me at my son's ball games and they have no idea that inside, I'm literally fighting for my life."