Eric and Mia's Hope for a Family After Cancer

Eric and Mia Ruehrdanz are reaching for something many of us take for granted: the chance to become parents. For the last four years, that hope has had to wait in line behind something more urgent.

A diagnosis at 28

In June of 2022, Eric was diagnosed with Marginal Zone lymphoma, a Non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. He was 28. As they put it in their own words, "starting a family was not the goal, it was survival."

What followed was two different cycles of intravenous chemotherapy, because the first cycle did not take. There were many trips to specialists located three hours away. There was radiation. There were masses removed. Anyone who has walked alongside a family through cancer knows how much that short list leaves out: the waiting rooms, the scheduling, the drives home in the dark, the way a household reorganizes itself around appointments.

Eric's current oncologist found an oral medication, Revlimid (Lenalidomide), that has put him into remission. That is the good news at the center of their story. But the same medication that is keeping Eric well causes severe birth defects in children conceived while a parent is taking it. That is the first reason they need IVF.

The second reason is the chemotherapy itself. Repeated exposure caused infertility. A successful microTESE procedure has given them real grounds for optimism, and they are hopeful that children are still possible. IVF is now the only path there.

Why the cost lands so hard

Family-building treatment is expensive almost everywhere, and insurance coverage for it is uneven at best. For families who have already spent years absorbing the cost of serious illness, the math gets especially punishing. Medical debt does not pause while you heal. Travel, time away from work, and the ordinary expenses of life keep accumulating. Eric and Mia name this plainly: the financial burden of having cancer has weighed on them for the last four years.

That is the gap community support is good at closing. Not because any one person can cover a round of IVF, but because a lot of people giving what they can add up to something a single family could not reach alone.

"There is so much to live for"

In their fundraiser, Eric and Mia write that they are finally seeing a life after cancer, and that there is so much to live for, including having children. They are hoping and praying for financial relief, and they close the way they started: with gratitude to anyone who takes the time to read their story.

If their story stays with you, we hope you will read it in their own words and give whatever feels right. Every contribution, of any size, moves Eric and Mia closer to the family they are building toward. Sharing their fundraiser with people who might care costs nothing and helps too.