Emergency Rental, Food, and Bills Assistance Programs

I pray this works… I’m a 38 year old disabled mother with 3 young children ages 2, 7 & 8 & I’m desperately needing emergency money to relocate me & my kids from my estranged husband’s house or should I say “his bosses” house because we are still under contract for deed until March of 2021… The problem is his boss AKA our landlord gave us 3 faulty contract for deeds which is WHY I was cut off of food stamps because welfare tried to accuse me of trying to commit fraud & what W2 jobs I did have despite my permanent physical & mental disabilities were destroyed by my estranged husband! He’s also moreless forcing me to work food deliveries for Uber Eats & GrubHub which has taken it’s toll on me & my vehicle

I used to have my own place during the legal separation proceedings but was forced out due to property destruction after a TBI blackout caused by my medical marijuana being laced by my former longtime medical marijuana provider & because I’m a medical marijuana patient I don’t qualify for federal housing & even if I did the waiting list is long!

The only debt I have is under $300 from an unwanted credit card I had to get in order to improve my credit score so I can rent a place but because I’m on SSI (disability payments from social security administration) I don’t have enough income to rent outside of federal housing

I’m 80 pounds now due to the lack of food I eat because of no food stamps & I’m worried that come March 2021 my kids & I will end up homeless because of my exes boss’s shadyness & homes are expensive these days!

I could ask for money for an attorney but I’d rather stay outta court for the sake of the kids, the legal separation was hard enough!

It’s embarrassing to ask for roughly $300,000 for a new home on acreage & new furniture away from city limits due to severe anxiety… I’m human trafficking survivor & I have issues with socializing with society!

I do however have a business license for my Montana Sapphire jewelry business & hopefully 1 day I can open up my own store in hopes of getting over my anxiety issues!

If U can PLEASE help me & my kids buy a new home & start over away from this never-ending nightmare it would greatly be appreciated, every lit bit helps… Thank U & God Bless

Sincerely LoraBeth “LB” Powers & Family

PS… I’m willing to work as well so if U are hiring for simple jobs I can do from home while taking care of my kids that would be awesome!

https://www.paypal.me/LBpowers

This is going to be rather long, so there will be a tl;dr at the end you can skip to.  While i don’t know if anyone will help, i’m at least going to try and get some therapeutic value from writing all this.

My name is Benji, and while my life can be described as having been rife with misfortune, having gone through everything that i have has made me into the good-natured, look-on-the-bright-side type of guy i am.  Plus my mom did well raising me.  I live with her now as a kind of live-in caretaker but really just her son, and NJ doesn’t do paid live-in family caretaker thru medicare. She’s on disability, and gets roughly $500 a month to live on, after copays and stuff it ends up being more like $200.

(My mom/early life) I was born in 1986. in ’87, my mom was hit by a drunk driver and hurt her lower back. In ’89, my little brother Donald was born.  There were complications with his birth; he had gotten his umbilical cord wrapped around his neck twice and once around his shoulder, his heart rate started plummeting dangerously low(memory isn’t perfect on this but i wanna say from 150/190bpm down to like sub-50).  My uncle John who was there went and got the doctor, who insisted she wanted to do a ‘natural birth’ to come and do something, and ultimately he was taken out by c-section. Also, while pregnant with me she had (i think) gestational diabetes, which ended up causing kidney problems that would ail her to this day.
In ’91, a few months after my uncle John was murdered during a robbery of my families candy store the night before easter(we had done like $50k that week, a former employee who knew when and how we moved money to the bank had planned two robberies before this against us where my granddad got beat up infront of our house), Donald(2yo at this point) had taken my dad’s zippo lighter while he napped watching baseball.  He went into the other room to play with it, couldn’t figure out how to make the fire stop(with a regular lighter you just let go of the button, a zippo you have to close the lid on the fire, which can seem counter-intuitive to a first-timer, who had apparently been going through a play with lighters phase, no doubt from the 3 adult smokers in the house at the time) and the house caught fire. The attic and upstairs were gone, and the downstairs was badly damaged.  My dad and oldest brother Billy stayed to rebuild the house, while my mom, older brother Patrick, me and Donald all went to stay in a camper at a campground for the rest of that summer, while my mom continued going to work.  My grandad still lived with us then, i forget where he stayed during this time.

(Mom II) After that extremely turbulent part of our life, i guess it was relatively normal for awhile, so i’ll try to cover the rest of my mom’s ailments. So ’89 she got hit and hurt her lower back, i forget the years but around this epoch she began going to the hospital a lot for what at first was kidney stones, the biggest of which was the size of a nickel, way too large to pass it normally.  My mom didn’t have health insurance, and the doctor basically wanted to use experimental procedures, telling my mom she could get treatment for free as long as she allowed the procedures to be recorded and used to teach medical students or something like that. The two things they tried were(and i don’t know the names, something-lithotripcy seems to sound familiar but idk), in my layman terms, putting her in a metal bathtub and shooting her kidney stone with lasers to try breaking it up, and another was using a coat hanger-like tool thru her back to poke the stones?  Or maybe the tool had heat or a laser, i don’t know.  What i do know, is that since then she’s been passing pieces of her kidney tissue thru her urine, and has had kidney pain ever since.
The rest is more straightforward. In 99′ she was stopped at a red light with my grandmom in the passenger seat.  Coming from behind, a driver who had been having an epileptic seizure(and knew she shouldn’t be driving, she worked as a nurse) and, unable to stop, slammed into the back of my mom/grandmom’s car, re-injuring my mom’s lower back and newly injuring her mid-back.
In 2000, While working at the same family candy store, after a winter storm, the Berlin Mart custodians were clearing ice off of the flat roof so it didn’t cave in.  My mom, hearing the banging and not knowing what it was, went out the back door to check.  She got hit on the head with an est. 60lb block of ice thrown down from the roof.  My mom ended up needing several vertebrae be fused together in several places, suffered cognitive brain damage from the blow to the head and has been on round-the-clock painkillers ever since.

(The store) Not long after that, we had to say goodbye to the family candy store of 27 years. My grandad had a mental break, he never grieved when his son died at the store, he tried to suppress it all that time and it just ended up breaking him. He died a year or so after we lost the store, cirrhosis of the liver and likely feeling like he no longer had a purpose. My mom was too physically broken to keep it going herself, and my brothers and I were too young/immature to take on that kind of responsibility, i was 13 by then.  It felt like losing a member of the family.  The store was always such a point of pride, it gave us a place and a community where we belonged, and we could bring so many people smiles just from giving them their favorite snacks, many from years long past that they thought weren’t still made.

(Onto me) My least favorite topic, me. So after the store, at 16 i was old enough to work and started working at a local movie theater. Then supermarket cashier/produce stock for about a year, party rental goods delivery/pickup+heavy labor for two non-consecutive years, then construction/painting for a few years. However, work largely ended during summer of 2007. In 2006 i began using opiates, pills for the first year then heroin, but that’s for a little later. I was walking a friend home(she goes on to be my son’s mother, but that hasn’t happened yet).  She just lived up the street, but it was after midnight and she’s real afraid of the dark, so i walked her home. About halfway there, we’re walking on the left-shoulder towards oncoming traffic.  A car comes from behind us, veers all the way from the right lane to the left shoulder, scoops me up onto it’s hood/windshield and just clips Tiffany. She falls over, i smack the back of my head on i guess the windshield and lose consciousness immediately. I wake up a substantial distance from where i remember being just a moment ago, face down on the ground, i kind of notice tiffany screaming at someone. For some reason, i don’t dare try moving my legs, instead i use my arms alone to crawl to the side of the road and vomit in the grass, then lose consciousness again. I wake up being put into an ambulance, i notice my mom is here now.  I go to the hospital to get scanned, only extreme road rash and a fractured eye socket or cheekbone.  Because i lost consciousness, i ‘ragdolled’ or went limp and as a result didn’t break any bones.  Oh, but i did also have a concussion. Also the road rash would go on to give birth to a gnarly chronic infection, and the brain damage would lead to something called Anterograde Amnesia.

Anterograde amnesia is the opposite of retrograde amnesia, otherwise known as the kind of amnesia they usually have in movies and stuff where a person forgets everything they’ve ever known. Mine goes the other way, where i remember everything from before the accident normally, but i have problems saving new memories. And as i’d stated earlier, i had begun using heroin, and in that year i gave myself MRSA staph endocarditis twice.  I had to be hospitalized for 4 weeks and another time 7 weeks, being given powerful IV antibiotics to fight these infections i got from not practicing sanitary injection procedure and reusing old needles.
In 2008, maybe a month after the accident it suddenly became hard to breathe. I could only breathe in about halfway, expanding my lungs any further resulted in pain, like my lungs were inflating into spikes from all directions. An x-ray showed some kind of film over my lungs, so they admitted me, took some blood cultures and sent it off to the lab.  It came back as Candida, or yeast infection, so they switched the antibiotics they had me on with antifungals, and this stay would last 2 months. When they released me, they told me to take 400mgs of Diflucan, an antifungal, every day, and that from the damage to my lungs and heart valves, i should only expect to live for another few months, maybe a year at best if i stopped using and took care of myself.(at one point in this 2 month stay they were going to replace my upper valves with artificial or pig valves, but they decided the chronic infection made surgery impossible) For reference, when a woman gets a vaginal yeast infection, you only take 150mgs of diflucan one time, and i’m taking 400mgs every single day for life. Clearly i haven’t died still, but not for lack of trying.

I started using opiates because i found myself so deep in despair from my depression. I’ve always suffered from depression and insomnia, but it got really bad around 2005.  I couldn’t enjoy anything, things i’d always loved doing just felt like chores, even watching tv, just being awake was awful.  I had no energy, no desires for anything whatsoever, and opiates i found not only fixed these feelings but made me enjoy things more than i ever had. With these newfound feelings of euphoria and elation, i began to wonder if something had been wrong with my brain.  Did i have endorphin deficiency syndrome, was it the cause for my depression?
So for a year or 2 i climbed opiate/opioid tolerance, i was outed early on, a few months in i got a hot bag and overdosed and had to be brought into the hospital to be revived, then spent a year-ish in vermont to try to get clean, which only ended up cementing my belief that i was destined to be unhappy unless opiates were a regular part of my life.  I used to write suicide letters to individual people when i couldn’t sleep up there, just to pass the time. Though for awhile i had wanted to leave vermont and just take $200 worth and never have to deal with anything again, and that it would be a kindness to myself and to those close to me who would have to deal with me forever.

(More loss) So my brother donald, for the most part we got along famously and were pretty close.  But i have a few serious regrets concerning him, one of which i’ll tell you about.  So donald smoked pot, maybe drank if with friends, maybe took a pain pill occasionally, but he mainly smoked pot and was just a very sociable person.  After i came back from vermont and continued using, he would ask me to stop.  I’d tell him that i’d tried, and that it isn’t that simple.  The things that drove me to use were still there when i was sober, and i didn’t know how else to fix them.  So he wanted to show me that you could quit if you just tried hard enough.  So he began taking more painkillers and found where to get heroin, and convinced me to teach him how to inject himself ‘or else he’d just find someone in camden and buy them a bag if they taught him. You can tell where this is going, yeah?
So, after a few months of him using, sometimes with me, usually with his girlfriend, he tried stopping. He laid in bed with my mom for about a week, only taking clonodine, a blood pressure medication said to ease withdrawl symptoms. The week ended when he got a check for about $120.  They found him on the back of the bus, slumped over and blue and cold. His one shoe was off, with the cap for mixing, a bottle of water, a used needle, two empty bags and 8 still full.  He didn’t know how rapidly your tolerance goes down when you don’t use for a week.  Apparently the bus driver hadn’t been checking the bus for people sleeping in the back for like 6 hours, so he got on, did his shot and died and rode around on the bus for 6 hours. I wonder how many people saw him.  How many though a dead person was just sleeping and best to leave them be.  I always check if a person is sleeping on the bus.  I’ve been on methadone maintenance ever since i lost my little brother, and i take the bus there and back 6 days a week.
I had been through so much in life, but i think this is what broke me for good. After the police came to tell my mom what happened to donald, it didn’t seem real.  Donald was just at a friends house or out partying somewhere right? So on the day of the funeral, i walked up to the steps of the funeral home, gave some awkward greetings to friends, steeled my heart and said to my friend Kat ‘Okay, it’s just like a bandaid’.  I went inside and stood just around the corner where i still couldn’t see inside the casket and waited until most of the people seemed to clear away for a bit. I held her hand, looked to her for support and made my way to see him, and it broke me just like that.  I saw him, truly dead, fell to my knees and wept like a child. This was all my fault.  He just wanted to save me, and now he was dead for his trouble. I must’ve cried out all the tears i had left, because i haven’t been able to cry since 2009. Even when..

(Even more loss) So, i wanna say it was 2015, my older brother pat was going through some shit, getting laid off or i forget the specifics.  I know he was pretty bad into doing coke/painkillers, and long story short he wound up robbing a bank and serving like 3 years in prison. Part of it was for money to use with, but really he needed to get away, and the drugs weren’t just going to let him walk away without a sacrifice of some sort, i guess.  So, a day and a half after he got away, he turned himself in, gave the remainder of the money back to the police and started his sentence.
After he got out of the halfway house and had been working for awhile, he came to live back home.  Again, long story kinda short he ends up using again, bit by bit.  One night, the day he’d gotten 3 weeks backpay from unemployment, he asks me if i know anyone he can get percocets from or anything like that.  I didn’t know anybody, and said as much.  This was at about 9pm.
4am.  I had just fallen asleep 25 or so minutes ago, and i hear my brother billy calling up the stairs, comes up and says i forget what, but something to the effect of something’s wrong with pat. I flew down the stairs with speed i didn’t know i still had, and saw my brother hunched over a small trash can.  Pat is like if the incredible hulk was a real person, and unconscious bodies are notoriously difficult to move, but i get him lying on his back and start checking for vitals/doing cpr.  I ask bill to call 911 and tell them we have a fentanyl overdose and need narcan asap, that he’s cold and we don’t know how long he’s been like this.  BIlly seems unable to make the call, probably embarassed to say that his brother was doing drugs, so i tell him to keep doing compressions and i call myself.
They say they’re on the way, so i keep doing cpr. I’ve done this before, i’ve saved other people who’ve overdosed with cpr and narcan.  Even though i still can’t find a pulse, maybe i’m just too freaked out to be able to tell, i’ll just keep doing it until someone gets here.  They get there, give narcan, give him oxygen and take him to the hospital. At the same time i go to leave for the clinic, i ask one of the emts that were still there who had helped with the oxygen ‘hi, i promise not to freak out, i just want to know for my own sanity, what do you think his chances are?’ and he said he didn’t know one way or the other.
My parents went to the hospital where pat was, and when i get to the clinic, i call my dad looking for a status update.  He’s gone. He was probably dead when we found him over the trash can.
Same thing, funeral, second time being my brother’s pall bearer carrying another brother to the same plot.  Only this time, i didn’t break down and cry. I thought maybe i was just in shock, but it’s been over a year now. I still don’t feel like i feel or have strong emotions or feelings towards almost anything. I don’t know.

I think there were a few other things(not counting the handfulls of years-long relationships with girls that mostly all ended in heartache, cause that’s just part of growing up for any hopeless romantic) but i need to get this finished if i plan to get any relief in the form of much-needed money, So here goes my money troubles.

(broke af for over a decade) So in 2008, i get hit by a car, then a week later begin a two-month stay in the hospital, began treating for what appeared to be walking pneumonia(i could only inhale about halfway, expanding my lungs beyond that caused extreme pain like my lungs were expanding into spikes, like they were in an Iron Maiden, as well as what was assumed to be MRSA Staph Endocarditis for the 3rd time, so powerful IV antibiotics were employed. Two weeks in, blood cultures came back positive for candida(yeast) and switched to powerful IV antifungals. 2/3rds of my stay thru, they were going to remove my two upper heart valves, because vegitation(s?) had damaged them. Shaved my chest, put me under to pull some teeth with abcesses so i didn’t die during surgery, then decided the busted heart valves couldn’t be removed because the yeast infection in my heart was and would always be present so anything new they put in would just be immeadiately damaged or whatever. At the end, before i left the doctor told me basically that i would only live a few months, and would have to take a large dose of oral antifungals(Diflucan400mg/daily) for the rest of my life. But obviously i never died, it’s now 2020, 12 years later. I was just made invalid and would often wish i had died. I can’t work, i can’t collect disability for a number of reasons, chief among them being my lawyer skipped town towards the end of my application for SSD/SSI, which unemployment told me i had to apply for back in 2008 when i got hit because ‘i lost my job to disability’, and even though i’ve had doctors reports every year saying i was unable to return to work for the maximum 12+ months. My disability? Well that’ll get it’s own little section.

(My disability) So, my upper two heart valves basically don’t pump on their own anymore, they merely allow blood to pass through on the pressure created by the rest of the circulatory system(i think?). I don’t know, but my heart’s busted, and my lungs are beat. Standing for longer than 2 minutes, or walking 10 minutes to the store, or up a flight of steps, and i’m sweating bullets and catching my breath for at least 10 minutes. I’ve quit smoking, i’ve tried cutting all sugar/starch from my diet and probably other things i can’t remember and nothing’s made anything better. I could get a job driving, but i owe child support, which i’ll never be able to pay, and being in arrears for child support gets your drivers license/passport/fishing license(yes really) suspended indefinately until the arrears are caught up, which are currently about $17,000. I suppose this in itself could be worthy of a gofundme or something, but i digress.
I haven’t had my own money since 2007. Every single solitary thing i need or want, i have to ask my mom for, who is disabled herself and only gets $400/month SSi because after she got disabled, but before she got disability, at the advice of her pain mgmt doctor, she tried working part time at 7-11 for a whole two weeks, and they base her pay from that job as how much she gets, which is pathetic. So my mom is basically supporting me. I don’t ask her for much, because i know she doesn’t have it. I’ve mostly gotten very close with my depression, and keep myself sequestered in my bedroom, doing without as much as possible. I have no quality of life, and nothing is going to get any better any time soon, or likely ever.
I don’t expect anyone to give me a few dozen grand and fix all my problems, i’m not so naive as to wish for something impossible. But a couple bucks here and there, i could save up enough to take me and my mom out to dinner sometime. You could say i’m her live-in caretaker, but NJ medicare doesn’t pay for that sort of thing. I know PA does, probably other states, but it doesn’t help me. I did get general assistance+food stamps, but they only allow you to collect that for 5 years and then that’s that. And, unsurprisingly, i forgot to put in anything about my cognitive disabilities from the brain damage i got from the accident. Basically, i have trouble remembering things, converting short term memories to long term memory, like all my memories from pre-2008 are normal, but if i have memories after 2008, they’re foggy at best. I meet the same people multiple times and am told that we’ve talked before, sometimes at length about things, and i have no choice but to believe them. I also have a worsening issue with communicating what’s in my head out my mouth. Like a few days ago, my mom sent me into CVS to see if the film she dropped off was ready to pick up. I stood in line, 6 feet behind 1 customer who was also picking up filmm and after like 5 minutes it was my turn. I got to the counter, stammered, then my brain shut down. This happens to me a lot. I had to ask the cashier to give me a moment, i stepped aside and stared at the photolab thing for a few minutes and finally was able to say ‘Film! I’m here to pick up film for my mom’. I know stress and anxiety make it worse, probably, but it also happens when i’m alone and under no pressure.

So, tl;dr – My life has been an almost-total bag of dicks, i’m an invalid and my live can not be salvaged. I ask for your help in providing me with some small amount of spending money, even if it’s one dollar at a time. I metaphorically fell on my ass over a decade ago, and there’s no chance or possibility of getting back up. I’m swallowing all of my pride and asking strangers for help so that i might obtain some small quality of life for my mother and I. She deserves it if nothing else. I would just take myself out of the picture, but my mom’s already buried two of her sons, i cannot do that to her.
Feel free to write to me, just to talk, to ask questions, if you have something to day, whatever. My email address is BenzoJamin@gmail.com and it’s also my paypal.

Also, if you do donate something, i encourage you to ask me for something in return. A video tour of going to the methadone clinic, a video of me branding something of your choosing somewhere on my body(i used to do it to myself so i’m able to do it no problem), maybe you found my life story an interesting read, or anything you can think of. I’m extremely desparate at this point.

im asking for money during this tough time because as of Monday 4/27/2020 i found out that i only have 2 weeks to certainly stay at where i am staying where i do pay rent i have been out of work for fear of the coronavirus i work at walmart with fresh food so im around people all day i recently tested negative but i fear that i will not have enough time to find somewhere and get as much money together as i can i figured its worth asking ive never done this before or asked anyone for money i mean even advice i live in Massachusetts where the stay home ordered ends may 4th so i will post the letter for all to see i thought people couldn’t be kicked out? but im not on a lease or anything so i guess that is why i just paid certain bills and paid rent i live with an older women im 29 shes 74 so i moved into help her but its turned into this im sincerely sorry that i am out here begging for money but unfortunately i am

https://paypal.me/ge000380?locale.x=en_US