Mother Remains Determined to Beat Aggressive Cancer

About this sponsorship: In honor of the 60th anniversary of Sir Edmund Hillary’s historic ascent of Mount Everest, Patch and Grape-Nuts are teaming up to highlight those who inspire people around them to climb their own mountains.

By Jessica Mullins 

Liana Day Williams, a San Rafael mother of two, is more determined than ever to win her fight against Lymphoma. But it hasn’t been easy. 

Her husband, Chase Williams, was laid off three days before she was diagnosed in October 2012 and has been too busy caring for Liana and their two children, a 9-year-old boy and an 8-year-old girl, to get a new job. Fundraising is underway to help the family pay for their escalating medical bills. 

After an unsuccessful series of intensified chemotherapy treatments, Liana’s aggressive form of cancer has continued to spread. Now she’s focused on staying stable — which has been a trial within itself — while waiting for clinical trials to begin at Stanford.

She ended up in the emergency room twice in May (once during Mother’s Day) after her lungs filled with fluid. The day after she was first admitted to the hospital, Chase had to inform Liana that her father in Montana had a stage 4 tumor removed from his spine that had paralyzed him. Chase refers to the news as coming “by cruel coincidence.”

Liana received emergency chemo treatments in the emergency room that Chase said he believes “saved her life.” 

Since those emergency room trips, Liana has been stable but weak, continuing to suffer from shortness of breath, she said. 

“I meet with clinical trial doc on June 10th, which is only a couple weeks away, but with the cancer progressing and all the symptoms I'm experiencing it seems an eternity to me,” she said this week. 

Liana is keeping her fingers crossed her treatment will begin on June 17. “Once I start the trial my goal is to reduce the cancer so I can get the bone marrow transplant, the final phase of treatment and cure,” she said. “I want to be able to spend more quality time with my kids.”

Liana has stayed focused on one main thing: she can’t die because her family needs her. 

“My kids, my husband, my family, and my friends all help me with my determination that I have to get through this. My kids are young and need their mother. I can't leave them or my husband,” she said.  “I have too much to live for, wonderful family and friends, all who I haven't had much time with lately due to the fatigue, and I miss them all terribly.”

When she starts feeling better she will play with her kids more often, she said, and her list doesn’t end there. 

Other activities she is looking forward to doing again include: 

• Bike rides to the park
• Swimming
• Hikes
• Taking her son to the skateboard park
• Spending more time with her husband
• Dinners out
• Movies
• Plays
• Dancing
• Seeing her friends more, having them over for dinner or going out to lunch
• Having more family and cousin days at the beaches, parks, and homes
• Going on a family camping trip
• Fixing up her house and yard

Click here to donate funds to Liana and her family. 

“To know we can look there and see some financial security has been an enormous relief in so many ways,” Chase said.