MyCare: Angie and Steven G. in Cleveland, OH

Angie: Can you imagine not being able to receive health care and be a two time cancer survivor?

Steven: I'm a musician. I play the bass guitar now and I'm in a band, and most of my days are spent playing music. Sophomore year of my high school career, I was fifteen years old, I began to notice some lower back pain, you know. I was a very active kid, I played sports, I rode my bike, I played basketball and lacrosse.

Come the end of February I was totally incapacitated. I couldn't get off the couch without taking doses of Vicodin just to even help me go to the bathroom. So my Dad called the spinal orthopedic surgeon and they found that I had a softball sized tumor in my lower back. That was kind of the day everything officially started.

Angie: Steven was diagnosed with stage 4 osteosarcoma.

Steven: So I underwent around ten months of chemotherapy and a week of radiation and then about a quarter of the way through the chemotherapy I had a two spinal surgeries to remove my tumor and fuse my spine. In January of 2007 I was declared in remission for my cancer and I could go back to school and have some normalcy to my life.

Angie: In the Fall of 2008 Steven was diagnosed with a secondary acute myelogenous leukemia, which is the result of the cancer treatments he received during his first cancer.

You can imagine how shocked we were. He was told that he must have a bone marrow transplant. You really never know what the outcome is gonna be, whether or not you'll have the strength to return to school, whether or not you'll have any secondary issues related to the transplant. Because my husband's insurance was changing with his work, my husband had to declare whether or not our son was going to be a full time student or not.

Steven: So we decided to be a full time student because I needed to do that to keep my health insurance.

Angie: In the Fall of that year Steven did go back to school. However, it was a very, very challenging time for him. He wasn't strong enough, he was exhausted and yet, we knew that he couldn't drop out of school because we were concerned about his insurance. Fortunately the law came into being, the Affordable Care Act, and we no longer had to worry about Steven being a full time student.

Steven: So knowing that I can go to the hospital and not have to worry about paying some massive bill, I'm not going to be able to afford--it's a huge relief.

The health care law is about people like me--it's Steven care.