Help Hope Live for Katie McIntyre Cocco

February 28th, 2025, a GoFundMe campaign was started to raise money for Katie’s life-saving treatments. Because 50% of the annually needed funds have been received, Katie resumed her monthly treatments for the next six months. Katie wants everyone to know that she is very grateful

Please read below about Katie

On January 18, 2023, our family received the devastating news that our eldest daughter, Katie McIntyre Cocco, now age 37, was diagnosed with Huntington’s Disease (HD). HD is a progressive, inherited neurological disorder that causes the gradual breakdown of brain cells (neurons) in a specific area of the brain. Currently, there are no known cures for HD. Miraculously, Katie’s MD/functional medicine doctor tried using ethically harvested umbilical stem cell treatments, which has slowed the advance of the disease and improved the quality of Katie’s life.

Insurance paid for 12 months of this groundbreaking, successful treatment for Katie. Since ending in December, unfortunately, Katie has become ‘wobbly’ again, and her insurance will not pay for any more treatments.

Friends have asked how they could contribute to help support Katie and Mike moving forward. Based on these inquiries, we decided to start this funding request to help out financially so that Katie can continue to receive ethical umbilical stem cell treatments. We, as her parents, are asking for your help to keep Katie healthy. The cost of these treatments is $75,000.00 per year and will be needed throughout her lifetime. Any financial contributions you feel led to make will be tax-deductible and are greatly appreciated. But we realize that not everyone is in a position to give money, so we also ask that you keep the Cocco family in your prayers.

We are so proud of Katie as she faces HD with remarkable courage and determination, demonstrated by the post below that she wrote shortly after her diagnosis: https://explorehopechurch.org/blog/2023/3/21/huntingtons-and-the-gospel.

See below

Katie Cocco

March 21, 2023

God is good, even in my disease

Sometimes our faith falters in times of hardship when we’ve held onto a false vision of what God’s care actually looks like. Earlier in my life, I remember hearing verses like “For I know the plans I have for you, plans to give you a hope and a future, plans to prosper you and not to harm you” as a direct promise for me. The tighter I held to God, the happier I would be. Or Romans 8:28: “And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.” I thought that somehow my circumstances would right themselves in the end, no matter what I was going through. 

The problem with this is that when deep hardship and sorrow arrive, our faith is so buffeted that it is hard to stand firm. I recently tested positive for Huntington’s Disease, one of the scariest neurological diseases for anyone to have: it combines all the symptoms of other neurological diseases like ALS, and at this point, there is no cure. But the more I’ve dug into the Gospel, the more hope I have, even though, according to my doctors, I’m just on a long road toward decline and death. 

Julian of Norwich, a Christian mystic, wrestled with this in her Revelations of Divine Love. The sickness and brokenness of the world all came about through Adam and Eve’s first sin, and Julian, like many of us, found herself honestly wondering why God had ever let sin (and its twin, suffering) into the world, because otherwise we would all be like Christ, and never have to suffer the sorrow of sickness or death. Julian claimed to have heard or sensed an answer from Jesus: “But Jesus, who in this Vision informed me of all that is needful to me, answered by this word and said: ‘Sin is behoveable [played a needful part]; but all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.’” 

Sin and suffering played a needful part! Even though, of course, he would rather we had never eaten the apple in the Garden, God used sin and all its ugly repercussions to reveal his Love in its truest form: in the person and death of Christ. Without sin, God could not have written this love letter across time, revealed in Scripture, history, Creation, and his living Word, Christ. And he still uses our suffering to open our eyes to our own sin and our hearts to his work. My grandparents are in their final years or even months of life, cooped up in a non-home they had tried to avoid. But rather than complain of what they’ve lost, they hold on to God more and more in this time of hardship. Sorrow has a way of clearing our vision, of making us meek and relying on God. 

I often grow depressed in times of hardship; often, my prayers are for the way out. But as I gain a richer understanding of the Gospel’s power, he is reframing my conception of those promises I clung to in my youth. The “good” of Romans 8:28 is more like the “all shall be well” of the mystic Julian. At our weakest is when we realize our need for Christ. Those who “hunger and thirst for righteousness…will be filled.” God can’t really fill us until we realize our hunger, and often hardship or weakness or illness or actual hunger can be the times when our minds are most receptive to the Gospel.

  The good news that Christ came and died to pay the price for sin, and rose to break its power doesn’t always hold the same power for us if we are in a time of prosperity, because we are able to fill our need for health and comfort in other ways. But in times of weakness and deep sorrow, we recognize our need for good news. We need to know that the warp that sin put into the fabric of the universe will one day come undone, through the coming of Christ’s kingdom. That we and our loved ones don’t have to be bound by fear of the death that is coming. Although Christ sorrows with us, he pushes back death’s power and renders it incomplete. We will pass through.

Jesus is walking with me through this. He is reaching out to hold my hand, and all I need to do is cling to the truth of what He did through his death and resurrection. All shall be well. All manner of things shall be well. Maybe we won’t see how until we can ask Jesus about it face-to-face. But my faith in the all-restoring power of the Gospel will hold fast as I wait for that day.

Katie is married to Mike, and they have two children, aged 5 and 7. They reside in Southeastern Pennsylvania.