Over the years, it has been near impossible to keep our heads above water due to mountains of medical debt from my wife’s medical issues. To provide more detail, she was born with something called a giant omphalocele. An omphalocele is a birth defect in which an infant’s intestine or other abdominal organs are outside of the body because of a hole in the belly button area. With the giant omphalocele, most of her organs were exposed outside of the body at birth, and with the medical techniques being what they were in 1981, the doctors basically just shoved everything back in and stitched her up.
As you may be able to guess, this led to numerous medical issues throughout the years, including the loss of both ovaries to ovarian torsions, large lengths of bowel needing to be removed, decreased motility, gastroparesis, and a whole mess of other things. On top of that, she also found out that she has two genetic disorders: Factor V Leiden (a clotting disorder) and Long QT Syndrome (a potentially deadly heart rhythm disorder).
As mentioned before, this has caused a constant inflow of medical debt that has sucked up most of our money and we’ve only been able to climb up so far by cutting costs and living as minimally as possible. On top of that, the ovarian torsions that were caused by the repeated benign cysts (and aftermath of the omphalocele) stripped us of the chance to have our own biological child. Combined with the debt, this also kept us from being able to adopt.
Over the last year or so, we managed to finally pull ourselves up and mostly recover from unavoidable bankruptcy, start to build our credit scores, and made a giant step forward; we bought our first home.
Our house is nothing special, but it’s ours, and although we don’t have much money, we worked hard and budgeted so we knew that we could afford the house payment and our regular monthly expenses with a little left to spare.
Then the surprise of our life came along. A friend of the family who had made some less than optimal life choices had a baby and asked us to adopt her. As I stated earlier, this was something that we had thought was completely out of our reach, so it was jaw-dropping to be able to have the chance of a lifetime dropped into our laps. Obviously, we jumped at the chance to adopt and finally make our family whole.
Unfortunately, due to the bio-mom’s choices, our little girl spent a total of 145 days in NICU and ICC, and we were up there almost every day during that time to bond with her and support our new little one. This, again, took a toll on our finances, but it was worth it to be able to bring this little girl home with us and give her a good solid family environment.
Since that time, emergency costs have gone back up, as she was also born with a birth defect called gastroschisis, which is very similar to my wife’s birth condition but on a slightly smaller scale.
Luckily, due to the circumstances surrounding her adoption, her medical care is fully covered, but outside expenses for us to stay at the hospital, or come back and forth for visits, along with food and other expenses needed for her have once again caused a financial mess as payments have backed up and crazy interest rates continue to grow our debt.
It is because of this that we are now asking for help to pay off what’s left so that we can start our lives fresh as a new family and give our little girl the best future she we can. After what this little girl has gone through, she deserves it.
So, here I am on a crowdfunding site asking for help, which is not easy for me to do. I’m a proud (my wife would say stubborn) man. I have always felt that it was my duty to support my family, and now I feel like I am failing at that which pains me to the core.
I supposed I should just cut straight to the thick of it. We have a debt remaining of $15,000 that is like a giant weight on our lives. If we could lift it off, then we could continue forward with our normal expenses worry free.
Anything and everything helps, and I can’t even express how much this would mean to me and my family.
PayPal Link:
https://paypal.me/StupidRooster?locale.x=en_US
Thank you all for listening.