My Mom Was Murdered in the Sandy Hook School Shooting. Now I Have to Crowdfund for My Healthcare.

A decade after my mother, Dawn Lafferty Hochsprung, was killed trying to protect elementary school students in the Sandy Hook School mass shooting, I am in the middle of yet another crisis brought on by poor policy: crowdfunding to pay for my cancer treatment.

In late March, I was diagnosed with Stage II lymphoma, a primary orbital tumor, along with significant sized pre-cancer masses in two of my lymph nodes. Until my diagnosis, I wouldn’t have understood what most of that last sentence meant. Now I know. It means that without aggressive treatment, I may not live to see my 38th birthday.

This diagnosis came as a shock to me. I had been aware of a small spot behind my left eye since 2014, but for nine years I’d been going to the eye doctor regularly to have the spot measured. It was always the same. We thought it was scar tissue. That changed last December. Fourteen weeks later, after many tests, I had a cancer diagnosis.

Read more at The Daily Beast.