The Stafford Family Care Fund

Maggie Stafford is a life long resident of Clinton, Iowa. She and her husband John own and operate Buddy Gourmet, a small business in the Lyons district of Clinton. Maggie has been an active member of the community from a very young age, and in her short life thus far has worked to raise funds for a variety of local and regional charities. She is a staunch advocate for animal welfare and health care reform, and regularly communicates her passion for these issues with our legislators. Maggie is a contributor of time and talent to the Junior Acheivement program, and ran a positive and hard fought campaign for Clinton County Recorder in 2014. In 2015, she was awarded the YWCA "Civic/Community Woman of Acheivement." Even when not in the public spotlight, Maggie is attune to the needs of others and consistently donates clothing, food, household items, books, toys, and any other resource she can muster to those in greater need than herself.

Maggie suffers from SEVERE fistulating Chrohn's disease, and she and her three boys are rare disease patients battling systemic auto-inflammatory disease, including periodic fever syndrome. Debilitating joint pain, nausea and high fevers are almost daily symptoms for everyone affected. For their family, this means frequent hospitalizations, trips to specialists, and as of recently, in home care for Maggie while she fights a life-threatening infection (she has a PICC line in place for self-delivery of twice daily IV-infused medication, and a drain in her abdomen to help combat the infection). It is a full time job balancing the doctors' appointments, expensive biologic prescriptions, side effects, dietary restrictions and day to day illness that prevents them from getting to school and work as often as they would like to. They participate in research medicine at the National Institutes of Health in Baltimore whenever possible. Some work is being done with gene sequencing for a mutation non-discerned that MAY be responsible for the disease. but the rarity of the patients like the Staffords means funding for research is very limited. 

Maggie is facing extremely risky surgery in the near future, with a lengthy recovery time. Surgery has not been scheduled as she is not currently well enough to be operated on.  We are establishing The Stafford Family Care Fund to help them with medical and living expenses during this difficult time. Thank you in advance for your support of my beloved sister! 

Kate Sager
563-212-8603
[email redacted]