Evan's Brain Surgery Fund
Donation protected
I am writing this open letter to appeal for your help with my quest to have my illness cured and get my life back on track. To do so I need to raise approximately €170,000 for surgery to have a 22mm pineal cyst removed from the centre of my brain.
Imagine this...
You are 23 years of age, full of youthful energy and motivation. Half-way across the world in Canada, you wake up to another promising day usually filled with energy and enthusiasm. Except that this is the day you begin to feel it. You feel a dead weight in your body from head to toe. You feel a pressure in your head unlike any sensation you thought humanly possible. Various areas of your body are weak, numb and tingling with pins & needles. Day after day the symptoms worsen until every aspect of your average day becomes a burden. Eventually they get so bad that you realise the symptoms you had thought inhuman at the beginning of your illness were at least bearable and you wish you were back there.
You spend months, and most of your earnings, trying to find a medical explanation but fall short. With the support of your family in Ireland you return home, still unaware of the cause of your symptoms, filled with hope that together you will reach a diagnosis and begin to attack these symptoms head on.
One week later after many different scans, a 22mm cyst is found on the pineal gland located at the centre of your brain and you realise that your nightmare is only beginning. By now your headaches are excruciating and the cyst is also pressing down on the optic nerve in your left eye, causing not just severe pain but also sensitivity to light and visual disturbance. Where once you were the life and soul of the party you now can no longer bear to be in a crowd of people because the noise hurts every nerve-ending in your body and the sensory overload is overwhelming.
You immediately seek help from specialists in Ireland only to find that they do not yet have the technology or skill to remove this cyst without a massive risk to your health, or even your life. Now every hope you had of finding a cure is diminished. Every thought that enters your mind is edged with the purest anxiety. You wonder about your future and it looks bleak.
You search the internet worldwide and find that there's a vast amount of people who have had the same experience as you, and that there is in fact a cure for this cyst, but the only facility that can cure you is based in the United States. The cure is an operation to remove the cyst entirely from the brain using microscopic technology in a procedure lasting several hours. You have since been in contact with the facility that can fix you and they have told you that although yours is one of the larger cysts of this kind that they have seen they can remove it, but in order to undergo this surgery you must pay $196,400.
It's like Everest in front of you and you don't know how to begin the climb
You are now walking in my shoes.
My Name is Evan Hickey.
Swallowing my pride and asking you for financial help is one of the hardest things I have ever had to do, but I ask out of desperation. I need to get my life back and surgery is the only way I can achieve this. I'm appealing to you to donate to my fund to help me realise my aim.
Imagine this...
You are 23 years of age, full of youthful energy and motivation. Half-way across the world in Canada, you wake up to another promising day usually filled with energy and enthusiasm. Except that this is the day you begin to feel it. You feel a dead weight in your body from head to toe. You feel a pressure in your head unlike any sensation you thought humanly possible. Various areas of your body are weak, numb and tingling with pins & needles. Day after day the symptoms worsen until every aspect of your average day becomes a burden. Eventually they get so bad that you realise the symptoms you had thought inhuman at the beginning of your illness were at least bearable and you wish you were back there.
You spend months, and most of your earnings, trying to find a medical explanation but fall short. With the support of your family in Ireland you return home, still unaware of the cause of your symptoms, filled with hope that together you will reach a diagnosis and begin to attack these symptoms head on.
One week later after many different scans, a 22mm cyst is found on the pineal gland located at the centre of your brain and you realise that your nightmare is only beginning. By now your headaches are excruciating and the cyst is also pressing down on the optic nerve in your left eye, causing not just severe pain but also sensitivity to light and visual disturbance. Where once you were the life and soul of the party you now can no longer bear to be in a crowd of people because the noise hurts every nerve-ending in your body and the sensory overload is overwhelming.
You immediately seek help from specialists in Ireland only to find that they do not yet have the technology or skill to remove this cyst without a massive risk to your health, or even your life. Now every hope you had of finding a cure is diminished. Every thought that enters your mind is edged with the purest anxiety. You wonder about your future and it looks bleak.
You search the internet worldwide and find that there's a vast amount of people who have had the same experience as you, and that there is in fact a cure for this cyst, but the only facility that can cure you is based in the United States. The cure is an operation to remove the cyst entirely from the brain using microscopic technology in a procedure lasting several hours. You have since been in contact with the facility that can fix you and they have told you that although yours is one of the larger cysts of this kind that they have seen they can remove it, but in order to undergo this surgery you must pay $196,400.
It's like Everest in front of you and you don't know how to begin the climb
You are now walking in my shoes.
My Name is Evan Hickey.
Swallowing my pride and asking you for financial help is one of the hardest things I have ever had to do, but I ask out of desperation. I need to get my life back and surgery is the only way I can achieve this. I'm appealing to you to donate to my fund to help me realise my aim.
Organizer
Evan Hickey
Organizer
