In 1994, doctors told Jay Homsey he would be lucky if he lived another two years.

Fourteen years, 17 different treatments and seven bone marrow transplants later, Homsey has shrunk 4 inches and struggles to walk, but he's still here.

Born in Lawrence and raised in Salem, N.H., Homsey, 53, was diagnosed with multiple myeloma in 1994 and has been fighting it ever since. Before the bone marrow cancer began to suck all the energy from his body, Homsey was dedicated to physical fitness and ran regularly, until a pain in his hip began to bother him.

"I went to a sports medicine doctor," Homsey said. "He told me after doing some blood work that he couldn't help me. He told me I was going to need an oncologist."

So Homsey went to an oncologist, who told him he had multiple myeloma, an incurable form of cancer.

"He said, 'Maybe if you get a couple of years more, you'd be fortunate,'" Homsey said.

As he fights to stay alive, too weak for work and struggling pay his insurance bills, which top $1,600 a month, his friends and family are doing what they can to help. Homsey's brothers, Christopher of Salem and Sam of Windham, have coordinated a golf tournament at Merrimack Valley Golf Club in Methuen to help raise money for their oldest brother, who was always there for them growing up.

"Whether it was teaching me how to dribble a basketball or talk to the pretty girl next door," Christopher Homsey said, "it was Jay who taught me everything that a young adolescent needs to know."

Homsey was born in Lawrence in 1955, where he lived with his parents until he was 11 and his family moved to Salem. Homsey is the oldest of five siblings, three brothers and one sister. His siblings and his parents still all live in Southern New Hampshire.

Before moving from Salem to New York City in 1990 to begin work in environmental remediation, Homsey led an extravagant life, traveling to Europe, playing basketball in the New York City Rucker League, and bringing a party wherever he went.

"If people knew that Jay was having a party, they would turn out in droves," Christopher Homsey said.

Shortly after being diagnosed, Homsey went from his home in New York to Little Rock, Ark., where he underwent two tandem bone marrow transplants. That involved removing bone marrow, ridding it of disease and putting it back into his body. The transplants were successful until 1999, when Homsey began to get sick again, he said.

This time, he underwent a marrow transplant with a donor — his brother Sam. He began to feel healthier and stronger, until 2001, when he started to get sick again. He became severely ill with a blood infection and fell into a coma for two weeks.

"(The doctors) said there was absolutely no chance, they told everybody that it's over," Homsey said. "They wanted my wife to agree to surrender the respirator and she wouldn't do it. Then one day, I woke up. My whole family was around, and I had no idea I had been in a coma for two weeks. The doctors were astounded. They had never seen anything like it."

Right in the middle of Homsey's fight with cancer are his wife, LeeAnn and daughter Dakota, 14.

"My wife and my daughter have really kept me alive," Homsey said.

The infection in 2001 wasn't the last time Homsey fell into a coma. It has happened three times since then, and his wife has been there all along the way.

"Its horrifying, often it's at 2 a.m. and I can't call anybody," she said. "They want me to sign do-not-resuscitate orders, but that isn't what Jay wants."

Homsey said his wife's energetic attitude has helped him through the grueling pain of seven transplants, the most recent earlier this year.

"She's the most upbeat, positive person you can imagine," Homsey said. "She cares for me when I'm ill and she's always encouraging me. Nobody loves their wife as much as I love her."

Homsey's last fight came less than two months ago, when he was stricken with a severe blood infection. For the first time, he believed it when the doctors told him he wasn't going to make it.

"They again called my family down, and this was it," Homsey said. "It was the first time I bought into what the doctors said, I thought they might be right. That's how bad I felt."

But he fought against the infection and became well enough to leave the hospital. Now, Homsey is receiving experimental chemotherapy treatment at St. Vincent's Hospital in New York. He is physically drained, but emotionally optimistic.

"The infection completely wiped out my body," he said. "I'm trying to recover from it. I am recovering from it."