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Summary

Thank you so much to everyone who helped fill Chioma's life with love, extending her life years beyond what most all doctors thought possible! Your loving support helped us overcome so many "impossible" financial, logistical, emotional, and spiritual challenges. May God multiply your generosity back to you many times over!

Chioma Malkin was a young wife and mother who heroically battled stage 4 breast cancer. Chioma went to be with Jesus on October 18, 2025. Details on the memorial events and final celebration of life event (where a mini-documentary will be premiered to honor Chioma’s remarkable life) will be shared here on GiveSendGo ongoing. Be sure to follow us to get email updates (see the “NOTE” above for how to follow).

• View Nov. 9 Memorial Service
• View Chioma's Obituary

What Happened

Chioma Malkin was a young wife and mother who heroically battled stage 4 cancer that had spread extensively to both lungs, bones, skin, and joints for over 2 years beyond maximum life expectancy. We (her husband Kyle writing this as well as Chioma) credited Jesus with leading us through this fight in amazing ways, and blessing us with astounding support from an amazingly gracious and generous community. Chioma not only lived past her 2-3 day prognosis in September 2023 to see her daughter's first birthday, she increasingly thrived all the way to celebrating her daughter turn 3 in September 2025. Sadly, while hospitalized in November 2025, complications with cancer in Chioma's liver, lungs, and intestines caused her to vomit while on BiPAP life support, which forced the vomit into her lungs and destroyed her ability to breathe. The heroic hospital team did all they could to try reviving her, but it tragically wasn't enough.

Chioma and I believed that God had spoken to us that it was His will Chioma to live a long life serving Him, so we fought wholeheartedly toward that end, following God's leadership. We saw God do amazing things—both miraculously and in guiding us to best support Chioma’s recovery with outstanding medical care. While we made treatment choice mistakes along the way that cost us dearly in the end, we have so very much to be grateful for, especially the 2.5 years of life beyond Chioma's max prognosis! 

Chioma began her battle against stage 2 breast cancer when originally diagnosed in April 2019. We fought using a combination of conventional and alternative medicine with mixed results. At the end of 2021, we believe God led us to defy doctors' predictions and get pregnant. As we obeyed, instead of dying, the remaining tumor mass we could see and feel shrunk an estimated 50% during most of the pregnancy, and our miracle baby Eliana was born perfectly healthy. The tumor began growing again towards the end of pregnancy. On December 30, 2022, our rented condo flooded causing extensive water damage, and ultimately resulted in mold due to improper restoration work performed. Because we were unaware of the mold for several months, Chioma became severely ill from mold toxicity. The severe illness was unfortunately a perfect environment for cancer to spread like wildfire. Our cancer treatments at the time couldn't keep up.

On Friday, May 26, 2023 at a family dinner, Chioma was having significant trouble breathing. We decided to go to the hospital where we learned Chioma’s lungs were nearly 80% collapsed by fluid, slowly suffocating her. Nearly 2 liters (4lbs) of fluid were drained from her lungs over the course of several days. Additional issues were also discovered including a blood clot in her right leg, dangerous levels of calcium in her blood, and worst of all that cancer had spread to both lungs, bones, and possible some other places as well. Two extremely-painful lung surgeries (pleurodesis) were performed to limit the re-accumulation of fluid in the lungs. The pain from cancer rapidly eating Chioma’s bones and organs was excruciating, even on the strongest of pain meds allowed. Chioma was released from the hospital on June 18, 2023, and we moved in with family who helped care for us and Eliana while Chioma recovered.

We were told by all the expert doctors who commented on Chioma's lung condition that the lungs would not reopen because they thought cancer had frozen them shut 50-80%. However, her lungs opened more and more daily after we were told that. As of early August 2023, the right lung had reopened about 80-90%, and the left had become about 50% open! The cancer started to retreat even further once more aggressive cancer treatments began in late June, and the worst of the pain largely subsided soon after adding in alternative PEMF therapy as well. However, much of the following year the cancer became so aggressive that we were losing ground overall, and Chioma's breathing became restricted to the point of needing frequent (and sometimes constant) BiPAP breathing machine life support both in the hospital and at home. Since May 2024, Chioma was slowly regaining strength and ability to breathe with less life support, and we remained convinced God would cause her to recover completely as we continued to fight (we fought to hold onto this perspective of trust in Jesus no matter how good or bad things looked).

We invited prayer and financial support to help us resist Satan’s attack on her life and help her heal. She made it so very far! The left lung cancer retreated to the point there was hardly a target left to go after at the end. Unfortunately, the liver was a mystery that eluded our ability to successfully clear of cancer in mid-to-late 2025. We and our team failed to stay ahead of the cancer, and Chioma ultimately went to be with Jesus on October 18, 2025. We don't blame God for misleading us. I believe we missed His guidance on several critical points especially at the end. Yet, even in our failures, God's grace still covers all mistakes. Most importantly, because Chioma had entrusted her life to Jesus, she is enjoying eternal life worshipping Jesus with perfectly healed lungs! To all who believe in Jesus, we will see her again, and worship alongside her before Jesus' eternal throne. God is good!

Our Needs

There were many practical needs that arose from the debilitating condition with which Chioma struggled — she was often unable to walk unassisted, unable to drive, and unable to lift or care for our baby due to limited breathing ability, strength, and energy. I and other family members became full-time caretakers for both Chioma and Eliana, including doing extensive research into medical options available, driving to many medical appointments most weekdays, and helping with basic self-care tasks. As a result, our family had very little income from the limited time Kyle was able to work. Conventional medical expenses were largely covered by our insurance, but our medical costs overall exceeded it significantly due to the need for holistic integrative medicine procedures (anti-cancer, immune-boosting IV’s; rehab; dietary supplementation; and a large handful of additional therapies). Conventional medicine had a 0% curative rate for stage 4 breast cancer, integrative medicine has some successes with curing stage 4 cancer, but “with God, all things are possible” (Matthew 19:26). We considered God our Primary Doctor, seeking Him for wisdom in most all our decisions and doing our best to follow His lead (we missed it sometimes, but our greatest successes we can all attribute to trusting God as we listened to and obeyed Him). The integrative therapies we were doing cost about $3-5k/week at their peak, and closer to the end closer to $2-10k/mo. We were using our life savings plus the generous gifts of friends and family to pay for it all. The combination of conventional and integrative treatments we did was estimated to cost around $250k at a minimum, and we will continue sharing updates on expenses here. For proactive accountability (so you can know we wisely stewarded gifts), we were tracking medical expenses publicly here (NOTE: starting late 2023 when Chioma's health became most severely critical, I haven't had the time to keep this up-to-date, but will do so as soon as possible).

Ways to Help

If you would like to help support us, here are some ways you can do so:

1. Prayer 

We regularly shared prayer requests here on GiveSendGo, and I will periodically continue to share about how my family is doing now that Chioma is gone. If you’d like to be notified when we send updates, click the “Share” button, scroll down to “Follow”, and enter your email.

2. Financial support

I thank God and you all that our medical debts are all paid off! And the rest of our money we were using to fight cancer is now repurposed to help my daughter and I recover and move forward. While no longer have critical need of raising funds, if it is simply on your heart to bless Eliana and I anyways as we recover and support the work of spreading Chioma’s legacy through the documentary, we gladly welcome your generosity. You can give here on GiveSendGo, or alternatively make a tax-deductible gift to us via GiveTaxFree (you'll get a tax-deductible receipt there). 

Thank you for fighting with us!

Blessings,

Kyle, Chioma, and Eliana Malkin

P.S. If you want to read all the way back to the beginning of our updates in 2023, check out the archive of older posts on CaringBridge where we started out.

Chioma’s Protocol

For those interested in what we were doing to support Chioma’s unprecedented recovery, you can see here