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At home, Muguette Veilleux won’t say the name of her 23-year-old son Marc-André Skelling’s illness aloud. Even over the phone and out of earshot, she spells it out: “C-A-N-C-E-R.”

“We made a pact with his brothers never to say it. It just hurts too much. When you say the word, it stings,” she said.

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Doctors diagnosed Skelling with Hodgkin’s lymphoma in May 2012 and told him his days were numbered. “It was unimaginable, the pain, the powerlessness,” Veilleux recalled.

Skelling’s cancer went into remission twice before returning in March, just around his birthday. After undergoing chemo, radiotherapy and a failed autograft, Skelling’s last hope is to find a stem cell transplant of a compatible donor’s bone marrow or umbilical cord blood.

Four months since the family and Héma-Québec put out a call for donors, they are still looking. They had a 1-in-4 chance of finding a donor among Skelling’s brothers Mathieu, 26, and Étienne, 20, but they turned out to be incompatible. Last week, his case took on more urgency after a new lymph node swelled up.