Sonora, CA—The Mother Lode is coming together to support a Sonora-area family as one of their twin daughters battles cancer.
The Borges family received the horrible cancer news after Madison, just shy of her second birthday this August, had an MRI due to an abnormality found when she was a couple of months old. At the time, her doctors wanted to wait until she was older to perform the scan. While not showing any signs or symptoms of anything wrong, recently her doctors decided it was time to do the scan. It revealed an aggressive cancerous tumor about the size of a golf ball in her brain, and she needed surgery, which lasted ten and a half hours.
“This is hard. This is a hard, trying time for our family,” stated Father Daniel Borges. “We still have two other kids, and you can’t just collapse but be present for them. You still have to make sure they’re ok too.”
Madison’s sisters, twin Elizabeth and older sister Emily, four, are now back home with their father as their mother, Kim, remains at the hospital with Madison, who has begun her chemotherapy.
“She has at least six months’ worth of chemo treatment, with the last four being of a very heavy dose of chemotherapy. Because she’s so young, they can’t use radiation on her, so they just have to do the whole thing with chemo,” shared Daniel.
The family was staying at a hotel at first, but has been able to stay at the Ronald McDonald House. However, the bills are piling up. That is when another relative stepped up and started a GoFundMe account to help the family pay for gas, food, the mortgage, and other bills, as Daniel has had to take a leave from work while dealing with this family crisis. So far, community members have given just over eleven thousand dollars of the fourteen-thousand-dollar goal. The family is overwhelmed by the community’s generosity, with Daniel commenting, “Thank you. A small big anything people are donating. It makes a huge difference for us. We appreciate the support of this community that my wife and I have grown up in, and have been here so long. It is so nice that people helped; we needed it, and they’re there. We appreciate it.”
