My name is Teresa. I’m 56 years old and have been through so much pain and suffering that I’m honestly surprised I’m still alive. I was married to a man for 20 years that started off being a good husband, father, and provider, but he let alcohol take over his life and one day decided he didn’t want to work anymore and started receiving disability. He became someone I didn’t know. Verbal abuse and physical abuse to me and my children until one day he had a massive stroke. After caring for him for over a year that’s all I could take of the abuse so I divorced him. I have been working for almost 4 years in management at a grocery store and ended up having to give up my job to care for him after the stroke. After divorce I went back to work in a different field. I struggled everyday trying to work pay all the bills by myself and take care of two teenagers. It was very hard trying to make ends meet. I’m at another man and started dating him. Early on in the relationship between the alcoholism and the physical abuse I ended up losing my job because I couldn’t make it to work with the black eyes and the busted lips and bruises. I couldn’t afford where I was living not to mention the bad memories from the marriage that I just got out of. So I ended up selling the place I was living and moving away for a few years. Sometimes there was good times but most of time everyday was a fight or an argument. I did try to go back to work even with my mindset of either being beaten, staying up all night because I could not sleep with the fighting and the arguing constantly. Then one night in the middle of the regular arguments, he grabbed me by my throat and choked me till I was almost unconscious, then he picked me up by my throat and slammed my body on top of a wooden coffee table almost breaking my back. I ended up going to the emergency room a few weeks later from some other complications that I thought was my digestive system or something. But turns out I had a blow to my kidney when I went through that coffee table, and after test and scans we’re ran on my organs a tumor was found in my right kidney. It was renal cell carcinoma a very rapid spreading type of cancer. It took me 6 months to be able to come up with the money to get an MRI, only to find out that there really wasn’t any treatment options, so I opted to have the entire kidney removed. After surgery a scan was done and a second tumor was found in my left kidney. That was in 2019. I had my surgery in 2020, and since July of 2020 I have been out of work, the first year was a healing process from the surgery. But after that is when I started getting accused of mooching and free loading off of the man that told me not to go back to work until I got my health right.I eventually broke up with him and I was left alone with no income no transportation no way to get to work pay my bills, I had nothing but an old mobile home that didn’t belong to me that I was supposed to be renting but I never could afford to pay the rent because I could not get a job and hadn’t no income whatsoever. But I struggled and strived the best way I knew how, asking for churches to help me with my bills, food pantries so I have enough food to to last through the month because my youngest son was still living at home. He tried his best to help me when he could. He was doing all that he could to try to help me but he was in the same boat with no transportation and that made it hard because where we live there’s nothing around us for miles except a little convenience store, a tire shop, a Dollar general that had just opened and that was about it. But in August of 2023 my world came crashing down, my son went to Houston to visit his children before they went back to school, got into an altercation with some of his family members from his dad’s side, and one of them shot and killed him. I don’t know how I’ve even survived the loss of my youngest child. It’s the worst pain that I’ve ever felt in my entire life. Since then I’ve been completely alone, struggling to just keep my utilities on. But my water has been turned off because the well that supplied my house was shut down by the new owners. So I have not had running water to my house in 2 years. I’ve kept my electricity tried to keep my phone on I did get food stamps so that does help me through the month. But I have contacted churches, charity organizations, community action, even when it’s far as to contact the news channel trying to get someone to help me pay the money to have a meter installed so I could have running water again. And no one has helped me so I am still living out of jugs. I was going to move and I’ll put a lot of my things in storage, and then the move fell through and I can’t keep up with everything so I’m about to lose my storage unit, which has my son that passed away, all of his things are stored in there. And it was due on the 1st of February and I have no money to pay it. Last Wednesday my electricity was disconnected for the first time. And I lived without lights for 5 days. Staying in this dark trailer with no electric, no heater ,freezing, until I finally was able to get a few places to help me pay it and get it turned back on. I have been doing everything in my power that I know to do to buy a car. Yes I have applied for disability but I’ve been turned down or denied three times since 2019. And I can’t just keep sitting here waiting for something that doesn’t seem like it’s ever going to come. I need a car. My car was stolen and totaled and sold for junk. The second car that I had just bought probably didn’t drive it 10 times, and I was trying to get the insurance to get it registered, and someone in the neighborhood got angry with me because I threatened to call the police on them for bringing stolen stuff on my property, so he destroyed it by putting water in my oil causing the engine to lock up. So that’s another one that had to be sold for junk. I’m asking or I’m begging, or someone to help me with enough money to catch my bills up, buy me a car, something that’ll just get me back and forth to work that’s all I’m asking. I want to go back to work. I have to go back to work. If I don’t get a vehicle and get a job and start earning income again I’m going to end up losing everything I’ve got. Including where I live and I’m going to end up on the streets with nothing. I have begged, pleaded, I have applied for loans, tried to get a car donated through the websites, and nothing has happened for me. I know I have cancer and I know there are times when I get pretty sick. But I want to work, I love to work, I worked my entire life until I got diagnosed with cancer. And I know I need to work it’s the only way I’m going to be able to keep a roof over my head and be able to pay my bills and try to move on with my life. And then I can start thinking about what I’m going to do about the cancer when the time comes. I don’t like asking anyone for anything because I’ve never had to ask for anything ,I’ve always been independent, and I’ve always worked since I was 16 years old. I hope people see this and read this and can find it in their hearts to help me. If not I don’t know what I’m going to do. There really isn’t much that I can do. This is my last resort. If I can’t get help to help myself, then I can’t see any reason to even try to go on. I want to live life, but I have to have a life to live. I put down $3,000 as an amount that I need. That would help me get me a car, get the meter installed for my water, and catch my storage payment up before I lose it, and have money for insurance and gas money so I can get a job.