When a bill collector called Chula Vistan Samuel Gilley Jr., 41, to pay up, Gilley told the collector that he was dying and did not have a job. Therefore, the collector would have to wait.

The collector then went after Gilley’s wife, bothering her at her job claiming, “In the great state of California, I can go after your wife,” according to Gilley.

The news may have crushed some, but Gilley is not one to back down or give up. It wasn’t in the nature for the sports fan who has given many hour of volunteer service to community baseball leagues in the South Bay and can recall sports trivia as well as any ESPN sportscaster. Gilley always had preached the message of never surrender.

Now, with a little help from his friends, Gilley has been putting up a fight for his life and his family’s financial security by selling tamales, doing car washes and speaking with bikini models to plan fundraisers. Social media was the avenue Gilley has been using to achieve his goals.

On March 15, 2012, Gilley began having chest pains while working for a temporary service. Alarmed, a co-worker wanted to call 9-1-1 immediately, but Gilley was reluctant because he did not have medical insurance. “Everyday, for a couple months, I hadn’t been feeling good,” Gilley said.

When someone saw him take a nitroglycerin pill for those chest pains, however, “the game was over,” Gilley said.

There was no putting it off; he could not fake being well anymore. When medical personnel arrived, Gilley was having difficulty speaking coherently.

At the Sharp Memorial Hospital they realized that Gilley had lost three pints of blood. His chest pains were the result of his heart working in overdrive trying to pump blood through his body. Gilley was admitted to the trauma unit where, after tests, he discovered he had a two-inch bleeding tumor blocking his colon. The cancer was later discovered to have spread all the way to his liver. “They said if you put all my tumors together, it would be the same size of a softball,” Gilley said.

Gilley was in the Trauma Unit for two weeks where he lost close to 150 pounds of his body weight. But Gilley is a fighter and a large man, so the loss of 150 pounds didn’t faze him much. When he was released two weeks later, he had 36 shiny staples in its stomach from surgery — which Gilley’s six-year-old son calls his “slinky”— and now his wife would have to routinely pack gauze in the wounds of his stomach.

Stage four cancer was the diagnosis. The likelihood of living five more years are slim, according to Gilley.

Gilley said even with government programs for help, he was out an estimated $10,000. Not much for Donald Trump, but a lot for a temporary worker. (If not for government help, he would be out an estimated $200,000.)

And then there were other costs including x-rays, blood work and analysis. Gilley’s parents helped with some of the costs, but it wasn’t enough. Gilley, himself, could not work anymore and he still needed to support a family.
So he turned to Facebook. He had over 600 friends he could reach out to for support. Many old high school friends began passing the word around. Their buddy from Chula Vista High School’s class of 1989 was in trouble.

Facebook friends and family put together a couple car washes to raise money at various parking lots near the Chula Vista DMV. Social media, it seemed, would save the day. “Some would come and work for a few hours and leave, while others would arrive to take their place,” Gilley said.

The dedication was there, but the money raised—close to a thousand dollars— was not enough as the bills kept coming.
Obviously, the problem needed a multi-pronged attack. Enter tamales. Months had gone by and the Christmas season is the best time to sell tamales as many Mexican families traditionally eat them during the holidays. Gilley and his Mexican American wife put the word out on Facebook that she’d be selling them to raise money. The response was fantastic.

Gilley estimates family and friends bought 1,600 tamales, which raised approximately $2,000 more.

And still, the ideas keep coming. A family friend, part time model, Elle Duprey of San Diego volunteered to get her friends involved in a bikini car wash in Pacific Beach. That idea was met with enthusiasm, but Gilley asked her to hold off until the weather got warmer.

Gilley says he actually had gone to a different hospital in Chula Vista three weeks earlier. According to Gilley, they told him there was nothing wrong with him other than constipation. He believes had he had insurance at that time, there would have received a more thorough examination — which could have saved him an emergency trip later. Gilley says had he had insurance years before, his cancer would have been caught years before. This could have saved Gilley the grief he and his family find themselves in now; this would have saved the taxpayers $197, 000.

Gilley is planning more fund-raisers to both pay bills and create a charity dedicated to cancer awareness.

Learn more about Saumuel Gilley Jr.’s fight and fundraisers at www.facebook.com/SamsCancerFight.