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Bridgewater couple with 3 children is battling cancer at same time

BRIDGEWATER, Mass. — Richie and Lindsey McQuade are enjoying what they love best, playing with their three young children in the backyard of their Bridgewater home. But it hasn’t been all fun and games.

“Last summer, right around July, I started getting a slight pain in my stomach, almost like a stomachache,” said Richie McQuade.

McQuade, who is 42 years old, initially thought it might’ve been his diet or even a hernia. Turns out he was diagnosed with stage-four bowel cancer.

“Extremely surprised, extremely surprised. I was speechless, to be honest,” he said.

If McQuade was caught off-guard with his diagnosis, he said he was absolutely floored when Lindsey, who is 40 years old, broke the news following her gall bladder surgery last month that she had been diagnosed with stage 3 Hodgkin’s lymphoma, cancer that affects the lymph nodes.

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“When I came out to the car to tell my husband he thought I was joking. I was like no. And he was like, ‘are you serious, is this for real?’ I was like yes, it’s so hard to believe,” she said.

“I was almost numb. It’s the one thing I prayed for is for her never to have to deal with what I was going through, and for it to happen, I can’t even put it into words, to be honest. It’s crazy,” Lindsey’s husband added.

In less than seven months, both parents, who work at Bridgewater State University, are battling cancer and undergoing chemo treatment at the same time.

“I feel hopeful for both of us, and we have no choice. We have three beautiful reasons,” Lindsey said.

The couple will alternate weeks of chemotherapy treatment. Doctors told Richie his tumor is shrinking, and he hopes to have surgery soon.

There is a fundraiser set-up for the family