After taking a round of antibiotics, doctors found that Silvio’s white blood count was still high. After more tests, they discovered Silvio C. Quintas had leukemia.
However, it was a highly treatable form of the disease and Silvio ultimately beat it. Katie Quintas, Silvio’s wife and the future CEO of Here to Serve, found a
cancer specialist (Dr. Ronald Paquette) who prescribed a state of the art treatment that battled Silvio’s cancer. In fact, the Gleevec drug therapy used on Silvio wasn’t available a few years earlier.
While Silvio’s cancer was put into remission by Dr. Paquette’s expertise, the course was still rough and at times painful. Silvio was subjected to bone marrow biopsies without general anesthesia, with the nausea and fatigue that comes with cancer treatments. Complicating the matter was a diagnosis of Parkinson’s Disease Silvio received a year earlier.
Katie, suddenly finding herself in the position of needing to care for her husband, found the strength to hold her household together during this trying time. However, her son was also diagnosed with cancer at about the same time. Though both survived, the situation went from difficult to monumental.
