“We couldn’t be more thankful,” he said. “I know sometimes saying ‘thank you’ feels kind of empty or it’s used so much that it doesn’t have a lot of meaning. But for us, when we say it, it comes from a very special place.”
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The Borgs tried to attend as many “Thumbs Up for Makayla” fundraisers in support of their daughter, but they couldn’t go to all of them. There were even some they were unaware of, said Anamarie Borg.
“Our whole community helped us raise $17,000 every month from August all the way through December,” she said. “Sometimes it was three or four fundraisers a day.”
Makayla doesn’t look like a cancer patient. She’s a fun-loving middle-child with a bright smile and is back in school at Sacred Heart. But treatments is the only option to save her life.
This past June, just three days after the 2015-2016 school year ended at Sacred Heart, they rushed their daughter, Makayla, to the Cincinnati Children’s Hospital for what they thought was a migraine headache. It was an inoperable brain tumor.
SOCIAL: Visit ThumbsUpforMakayla on Facebook for updates
Since that time, the community has rallied around the family that relocated a few years ago from California, and the community was able to raise enough money to where they could treat Makayla in Texas for a specialized chemotherapy. However, it didn’t work, and after several months of treatment the tumor had grown slightly, according to MRI results this past November.
The doctor told them the treatment should have reduced the tumor by half, if not more.
“It was a low blow,” said Kevin Borg. “It was like starting all over again.”
Anamarie Borg said when they were hoping for and expecting good news, “it was like finding out all over again” she had cancer.
But there’s hope again for the parents of three. Despite being treated by a doctor in Texas, the Borgs never lost touch with Makayla’s doctor at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital. They’re now in the beginning of a new year-long chemotherapy treatment. In March — 13 weeks into the treatment — they’ll find out how she’s progressing and if this second cancer treatment will work, said Kevin Borg.
If it doesn’t work, they’ll stop the treatments and try something else, they said.
Though it’s impossible to tell at this point if the cancer treatments will help — she’s having no apparent side effects and isn’t sick, however, it was the same with the Texas treatments — the Borgs are praying this treatment works.
“She’s energetic, she’s in school, she’s not getting sick,” Kevin Borg said. She’s just being a kid, so that’s very promising. If we are to continue with this medicine with those kinds of results, we’ll be ecstatic.”
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