Elliot's Top Surgery Fund

Hello! 

I'm Elliot Cooper, author of LGBTQ+ romance and retail worker. I'm a 33 year old married father of one. I'm also a trans man in need of top surgery. 

I've spent the last five years trying to save up for top surgery on my own, hating the idea of asking for outside help for something so huge. My spouse works one full time job and I work two part time retail jobs plus my author career whenever I'm not sleeping or dayjobbing. But every time I'm able to collect more than a couple hundred dollars, something breaks. The roof needs to be repaired. The AC unit dies. A car breaks down. An unexpected medical bill pops up. Rinse and repeat. 

I don't want to be forty or fifty without getting my chest fixed. I don't want to spend another five or ten years binding daily, being uncomfortable in my skin, worrying about whether or not I'm going to be outed at a bad time because my binder might be apparent through my shirt. I'm tired of feeling like my body doesn't fully belong to me. But I can't gather the means to fix it further than HRT (Hormone Replacement Therapy) on my own. 

Not only is top surgery expensive by itself (see  breakdown at the bottom), but my doctor of choice is out of state for me, which means I'll need to stay in a hotel for 7-8 days. I'll also need funds for travel and food. And the recovery from the procedure will put me out of my day job (which is a physical job requiring a lot of heavy lifting, being on my feet, arm movements, pushing, and pulling) for 4-6 weeks. That job pays for my family's groceries, phone bill, and internet bill. (The latter utility I use for my writing job, which I'd like to continue working on while in recovery since I won't be able to do much else!)

So I've set the campaign amount at $10k to hopefully cover all of the above. In the event that the goal is reached and I've over estimated the overall costs, I'll donate any excess I receive to someone else's top surgery fund. 

Cost breakdown:

* Surgery - 6,575
* Anesthesia/Hospital Fees - 1,550
* Lab Fees ~270
* Gas Money Roundtrip (1,120 miles) ~585
* Hotel (Arrive day before surgery, stay for a week post ~8 nights @$129/night) - 1,032 
* Post-op Medication - ?

(NOTE: 4/19 - I was notified by the surgeon's office that they're increasing the surgery cost by $75. I've adjusted the pricing breakdown above to reflect that increase.

NOTE: 3/24 - Since my guesstimation math was bad and I hesitate to increase the goal amount, I'm planning to look at alternative lodging options that are cheaper once I'm comfortable setting a surgery date.

I'm continuing to set aside a little from each paycheck I can to cover the wages I'll lose while I'm out of work for 6 weeks + food costs during the trip.

I'm also attempting to go full-time at my day job so I can acrue some paid leave to help during recovery time, but this is not guaranteed to happen.

NOTE: 6/15 - I've added a reward for any donation - a short story about zombies in the workplace called Working Stiffs. My thank you to you!)

Any help you can give would be greatly appreciated! If you don't want to donate but want to help, please share my GoFundMe campaign, check out my website and buy one of my books, or share the pinned tweet on my twitter account to help spread the word about my books! :)

Website ahoy!
And Twitter, too.

Thank you so much!