The Eytcheson Family Is Ready for Kickoff
The road to Shallowater runs straight across West Texas cotton country, a stretch of open land that teaches a woman how to keep moving, even when the miles shift beneath her. For Amber Eytcheson, that road has defined a year filled with detours and recalculations.
Amber lives outside Lubbock near Shallowater, Texas, with her husband, Ryan, and their two boys — Wyatt, seven, and Merritt, three. Their family’s rhythms move between school schedules, horses in the pasture, barn cats underfoot, and a house covered in Green Bay Packers gear. They are a Packers household living in Cowboys territory, and they wear that title like a badge.
Before her diagnosis, Amber’s story started on a family farm in a small German-rooted community in east-central Missouri. Summers were spent on her grandparents’ land with cousins working from sunrise to sunset. She learned early how to handle cattle, buck hay, and carry her share of the work, no matter her age or gender. Those years shaped her sense of direction. She earned degrees in crop science and agronomy, completed Ph.D. coursework at Mississippi State, and built a career in agricultural research, becoming the first woman hired as a field research scientist in her division.
Her life in West Texas balanced research plots with mountain escapes — hikes in the Rockies, tent camping, and family trips timed to outrun the summer heat. Then October 2024 arrived. A lump appeared. Mono followed. A mammogram was scheduled for mid-December. After Christmas, a biopsy confirmed invasive ductal carcinoma, Stage 3B Triple Negative Breast Cancer.
Treatment began in January. The schedule was immediate and unforgiving: immunotherapy, sixteen rounds of chemotherapy, surgery, radiation, and medications layered on top of one another. When her port failed, she had it replaced. When she reacted to immunotherapy, she developed sudden rheumatoid-arthritis symptoms so severe she sometimes relied on a wheelchair. When scans showed her cancer wasn’t responding to the initial chemotherapy regimen, her team paused, reassessed, and adjusted course. Her surgery plan shifted. A pulmonary embolism required hospitalization. Each step demanded attention and flexibility.
Amber transitioned her oncology care to UT Southwestern, where her physicians moved her into a dose-dense radiation plan — sixteen treatments delivering the strength of thirty traditional doses. The schedule was harsher but allowed her to return home sooner, which mattered most.
Through all of it, she stayed grounded in her faith. She names the fear, isolation, and exhaustion without minimizing any of it. She also names the support that surrounded her: neighbors who stepped in, including one with decades of oncology experience; friends who called and prayed; and strangers who added her name to their lists. She holds tightly to the role she believes she was given — to remain present as Ryan’s wife and as the mother of Wyatt and Merritt.
Now, as treatment moves toward its final phase, she allows herself to look ahead. Not to a vacation far from home or a long wish list, but to something simple and meaningful: a Packers game with her family.
For years, the Eytchesons hoped to attend a game together. They visited Lambeau Field, but they never watched their team play in person. Tickets and travel always made it feel out of reach.
On December 28, that changes.
Thanks to her Love Bomb, Amber, Ryan, Wyatt, and Merritt will attend the Ravens vs. Packers game — their first true family trip since her diagnosis. It is a chance for Amber to sit next to her boys in a stadium, wrapped in winter gear instead of hospital gowns, hearing their laughter instead of infusion pumps. It is the experience she described when she wrote that her dream was to take her boys to a Packers game, wherever it was played.
The Rural Gone Urban Foundation’s Love Bomb is making that moment possible — not as a distraction but as a reminder that her life exists beyond appointments, scans, and treatment calendars.
It is a day her boys will remember, it is a day Amber has earned, and it is a day that signals something steady: a return to joy, to forward motion, and to the life waiting for her on the other side of cancer.
