Help Jan Fight!
Donation protected
A few years ago, while driving to work my mom saw a woman and her children walking down the street in the rain. Mom pulled over and offered them a ride. Over the next few weeks she gave the woman and her children several more rides, and learned the now single mother had recently left an abusive relationship and was staying in a shelter.
My mom is a selfless person. She would do anything for her friends and family and, even for strangers: ignoring the possible dangers of picking up a strange woman and her kids on the side of the road.
For more than a decade my mom suffered from symptoms of autoimmune disorders before being diagnosed with Rheumatoid Arthritis, and much later Sjogren’s Syndrome. She also lives with severe pain and weakness from stenosis in her back and herniated disks that are pressing on nerves.
In 2013 my mom was diagnosed with Idiopathic Pulmonary Fibrosis. There is no cure, and any treatment is experimental at best, and the most optimal results will only slow down the progression of her disease. If you're lucky, you get a lung transplant. We don't yet know if my mom will be a viable candidate for a transplant, though she has met with doctors at the transplant center at Vanderbilt. She's what her doctors like to call a "difficult case."
In a perfect world money would never be an issue. All of her medical care and needs would be taken care of and insurance would cover every procedure, pill, and hospital stay 100%. Unfortunately that's just not how the real world works.
To put a little perspective on the cost of illness, a paper published in 2012 (with data from 2008) estimated the average cost of Idiopathic Pulmonary Fibrosis as being $26,378 per person per year. And according to the Kaiser Foundation the average hospital stay in Tennessee (the most recent data is from 2011), per day is $1,541. My mother has already spent eleven days in the hospital this year, after having an abdominal abcess, and later a colon resection to repair the damaged caused by the abcess. While they don't know for sure, her doctors believe the abcess was a result of the extremely high dosages of steroids mom has been the last few years to keep her Sjogren's under control.
With your gifts we can get her treatment she might not otherwise have access to, offset the cost of what insurance won't cover. Having money set aside just in case she's a candidate for a transplant. Or, being able to pay for her to go to the Mayo Clinic, and see a PF specialist, if that’s something she decides she wants to do. And pursuing treatments, like Esbriet which we’re hearing may be available in the U.S. by fall and is already being used to treat IPF in other countries.
We want to be able to do anything we can to comfortably prolong my mother’s life. Not only because we will all miss her when she’s gone, but because the world is a better place with people like her in it. However, as hard as it is to think about, Pulmonary Fibrosis is terminal and that means ultimately, quality of life and comfort will become our primary concern for mom. My brother and I, and the rest of our family would much rather see my parents enjoy whatever time left they have together than worrying about medical bills.
My mom is a selfless person. She would do anything for her friends and family and, even for strangers: ignoring the possible dangers of picking up a strange woman and her kids on the side of the road.
For more than a decade my mom suffered from symptoms of autoimmune disorders before being diagnosed with Rheumatoid Arthritis, and much later Sjogren’s Syndrome. She also lives with severe pain and weakness from stenosis in her back and herniated disks that are pressing on nerves.
In 2013 my mom was diagnosed with Idiopathic Pulmonary Fibrosis. There is no cure, and any treatment is experimental at best, and the most optimal results will only slow down the progression of her disease. If you're lucky, you get a lung transplant. We don't yet know if my mom will be a viable candidate for a transplant, though she has met with doctors at the transplant center at Vanderbilt. She's what her doctors like to call a "difficult case."
In a perfect world money would never be an issue. All of her medical care and needs would be taken care of and insurance would cover every procedure, pill, and hospital stay 100%. Unfortunately that's just not how the real world works.
To put a little perspective on the cost of illness, a paper published in 2012 (with data from 2008) estimated the average cost of Idiopathic Pulmonary Fibrosis as being $26,378 per person per year. And according to the Kaiser Foundation the average hospital stay in Tennessee (the most recent data is from 2011), per day is $1,541. My mother has already spent eleven days in the hospital this year, after having an abdominal abcess, and later a colon resection to repair the damaged caused by the abcess. While they don't know for sure, her doctors believe the abcess was a result of the extremely high dosages of steroids mom has been the last few years to keep her Sjogren's under control.
With your gifts we can get her treatment she might not otherwise have access to, offset the cost of what insurance won't cover. Having money set aside just in case she's a candidate for a transplant. Or, being able to pay for her to go to the Mayo Clinic, and see a PF specialist, if that’s something she decides she wants to do. And pursuing treatments, like Esbriet which we’re hearing may be available in the U.S. by fall and is already being used to treat IPF in other countries.
We want to be able to do anything we can to comfortably prolong my mother’s life. Not only because we will all miss her when she’s gone, but because the world is a better place with people like her in it. However, as hard as it is to think about, Pulmonary Fibrosis is terminal and that means ultimately, quality of life and comfort will become our primary concern for mom. My brother and I, and the rest of our family would much rather see my parents enjoy whatever time left they have together than worrying about medical bills.
Organizer
Kara Myrick Ferguson
Organizer
Lenow, TN