Be Rad For Brad: One man’s battle against cancer

Be Rad for Brad. That's the motto for an event raising money for a Cape Girardeau man working full-time for his family while battling Stage 4 Cancer
Published: Mar. 18, 2023 at 11:09 PM CDT

CAPE GIRARDEAU, Mo. (KFVS) - Be Rad for Brad. That’s the motto for an event raising money for a Cape Girardeau man working full-time to support his family while battling stage four cancer.

Brad Moore and LaKrisha Moore, Brad’s wife, both work locally in Cape Girardeau. Joy Brooker is one of their friends and helped put this event together in support.

Brooker says the money generated towards their $20,000 goal comes from donations, silent auctions, and tickets and will be used towards treatment costs of Brad Moore’s diagnosis of stage 4 Melanoma.

Brad said that in 2014, he noticed a strange mole on his neck and doctors diagnosed it as melanoma without metastasis.

“Just a little brown little mole that was here, it was jagged so I showed it to the doctor and they said ehhh let’s go ahead and get that off of you,” Brad said.

But in July 2022, Brad once again noticed a mass on his neck in the exact area where the mole was removed in back in 2014. Then in the following October, he said a 25-minute procedure became a two and a half hour surgery.

“After I guess it was about an hour the nurse comes out and she says it’s kinda taking us a little longer than expected, at that point I kinda started wondering, what was going on,” LaKrisha said.

But as soon as LaKrisha could speak to the surgeon, that’s when she heard the news.

“He told me that it was a fatty deposit that actually he felt, so that was right, but it was a huge mass and of course it just kind of went out and it was in lymph nodes and they couldn’t remove all of it,” LaKrisa explained.

Brad said once he woke up, he knew something was off.

“I woke up and I knew that something felt off, my wife came in, the doctor’s were coming in and checking on me and I think they were just kinda looking at me, it didn’t feel like a quick in and out, my wife came and said hello to me, and I could just see on her face, I said, they found something didn’t they and she goes yeah, yeah they did,” Brad shared.

After that Brad says he began immunotherapy to treat the remaining cancerous cells and nodules, only to find out in January that his cancer had spread. He now is fighting stage four aggressive metastatic melanoma and said that his family is what keeps him going.

“I mean I don’t have a choice, I have a family that I love very much that loves me very much, they depend on me. I don’t have a choice to not fight, I don’t have a choice to not keep going I don’t have a choice to not work, I just, I do it for them,” Brad said.

Organizers share you can help donate at this link: https://www.gofundme.com/f/bradly-moore?utm_campaign=p_cp%20share-sheet&utm_content=undefined&utm_medium=copy_link_all&utm_source=customer&utm_term=undefined&fbclid=IwAR1AhCrpOYOONJa_g389WHLOjwIuCzy_5V5AWK0grDnO_mLVmWU6bdRLbtw