Hello everyone, my name is Deborah, and my daughter's name is Lexie. I never thought I'd need to ask for financial help, but no matter how hard I've tried, it hasn't been enough. 2022 began with so much promise. I thought my husband and I were well on our way to a stable retirement, and my girls and had just returned from a short trip in January full of laughter and fun experiences. THEN the other shoe dropped, and the mask fell off! We went to sleep and woke up with a life destroyed! It was never again going to be okay. I received a call my husband was arrested by the FBI in Houston and was in a federal detention center. He remains in that detention center awaiting trial and most likely with be serving time for a number of years. There were so many FBI agents involved that this was no accident or mistaken identity. My husband made the choice to break the law and destroy our lives. He was immediately fired from his job, which began the downfall of our finances. His bad choices caused us to lose most of our retirement money and a bonus he was to receive. We definitely were not his priority!! What little money I had access to is almost gone, and as of May 1st, I don't have the money needed for rent and utilities and our phone service and alot of living expenses. I've got a little money saved for food and gas for the car and to pay our health insurance for May(which I'll explain next). What Lexie and I need is temporary help through from May through July, so I can get Lexie through the school year, find a job, and pay for legal help to get half of what's left in our retirement account hopefully by the end of summer or beginning of Fall. Hopefully I won't need help in July, but the wheels of justice turn slowly. I have monthly fees I need to pay my lawyer to continue helping me. Suddenly I've have to make alot of decisions with little resources. The stress and worry i feel is indescribable. This is where Lexie and I find ourselves. And because Lexie is my child, I will do whatever it takes to be sure she is safe and taken care of. She deserves a good life and a normal life of a 17 year old. What this has done to my daughter is the worst part of it all...

I need to take a few steps back to explain a few things and you will then understand the photo i posted. In November of 2019, Lexie began getting sick with various medical problems which didn't seem connected, but were popping up every few weeks and getting worse. She was also scheduled to have ankle surgery from a fall during a school dance. With so much going on, I hardly knew where to turn next. Rashes, getting bruises easily, "bumps" on her knees, fevers sometimes at night. Her neck hurt alot.I took her for MRIs, xrays, to regular doctors, orthopedic doctors, neurologists, etc. I think I took her to 20 different medical people from Nov 2019 til June 2020. Nobody seemed to be able to diagnose this. I understood this could be difficult, but as a mom, I was getting more and more worried. I had scheduled an appointment with Children's Hospital, but with COVID, it was taking 3 months to be seen at Children's Hospital. Every few nights, my daughter would come down the hallway to my bedroom, crying, in pain, hot all over and for a time hopping on one foot healing from ankle surgery. During all this, she still had to try to go to school. To this day, I do not know how she did it! I hid my worry from her and cried in the darkness at night. There's nothing more helpless than seeing your child suffering and nobody can help her! In June 2020, Lexie began throwing up and seemed "out of it." I was terrified! I made phone calls all over and had her seen at the emergency room. There they did blood and urine tests and were about to send her home again. That's when i became a "Momma Lion" and said "no that's not what's going to happen." Something was very wrong. Finally they took her by

ambulance to Children's. We met her at the hospital , and she was admitted overnight for more tests. I drove home home. I was home less than an hour when the nurse called me and said "you need to get here soon. Lexie has taken a turn for the worse." I cried and prayed the whole way back to Children's. The photo I posted is how i saw my daughter when i walked into the ICU at Children's. She was hooked up to all kinds of machines and a ventilator. I was told Lexie had a serious seizure 15 minutes after i had left the hospital. What frightened me most was the doctors looked scared too. No parent should ever have to walk into a hospital and see her child looking the way my daughter did. Lexie was in the ICU for four days, then in the step down unit for almost two weeks. I spoke to so many doctors my brain was spinning. The first several days out of the ICU, Lexie had a difficult time with short term memory. She had no memory of what happened to her. I'd tell her something, walk out to get lunch, come back, and she would not recall what we talked about. She had every kind of therapy you could think of, PT OT, speech therapy etc. The doctors consulted the Mayo Clinic and places outside the country. It took until the second week the rheumatology and neurology team to come up with a diagnosis. Lexie has a rare form of SJIA with MAS. Its a form of juvenile idiopathic arthritis that can affect her entire body and caused inflammation on her brain and thus the seizures. Its the brain part that can be very serious. She was put on 8-10 different medications. This is often caused by a genetic mutation, so I had them do the testing. It turns out that Lexie does have the genetic mutation, which began to make more sense.

Lexie will have this disease the rest of her life. We control it with medications and a shot every 3 wks. Without an insurance company/plan covering these medications, they are way too expense. Her shot every 3 wks would cost $25,000. Having the right health insurance is crucial, because very few companies cover what Lexie has to take. This is the reason I included the photo of Lexie in the ICU. It's also why I said my husband has messed up priorities, because the photo shows what can happen to Lexie without health insurance, and thus without her shot. My daughter's life depends on this, and my husband decided to break the law, which he knew would result in losing his job and health insurance. I don't understand this kind of selfishness! It's one thing if you make a mistake, then do all you can to make it better. He rolled the dice on our lives, lost, then told me he isn't going to pay for anything as of May 1st. He's more concerned with what he's going to do when he gets out. What about your family? What about Lexie's medical needs? What about how you've affected your kids... and not just financially? Considering what he was arrsted for, he certainly doesnt care about me at all.

If you ever see my daughter, you'll think there's nothing wrong with her. That's because Lexie has worked hard to get where she is now. She's the most courageous person I've ever known. I'm blessed to be her mother! From hospital release throughout 2021, she had almost 50 medical apts as continued follow-up. OT, PT, speech therapy, rheumatology, neurology, neuropsych. She's been blessed to be stable since winter 2020. Lexie has her "bad days,' but she handle those the best she can. People don't see her at night when her whole body hurts after a track practice or a track meet or a rash flares up or she's having a fever. And nobody but her family knows how hard she has had to work to catch up in school the past 2 1/2 years. Because of all the apts, Lexie does not have her drivers license yet, so I drive her everywhere. We're also blessed with a few of her friends who will be kind and helpful enough to take Lexie to school or pick her up. Thank god for these people too! It's not always easy to be a junior in HS and have your mom have to drive you when you want to drive yourself, but she takes it in stride!

Lexie just wants to be a normal teenager and i want that for her too! Stress can give her flare-ups, so the last few months have beena little tough. I've been lucky to be able to be a stay-at-home mom with her from the beginning of her illness. But I've had three back surgeries, so I'm a little uneasy about how backs can be unpredictable. I do what i must to keep my body strong.

I began 2022 thinking life was going well, laughing with my girls, and thinking my future was going to be bright. Instead i woke up one Tuesday and our life no longer makes sense. And If you've ever had to deal with getting insurance under COBRA, it's alot of calls, waiting, and high premiums. Its taken alot of the money I had, but nothing is worth more than my daughter's life! This is why I also need temp financial help to pay the premiums, along with rent, utilities, phone, monthly expenses. My husband paid everything, so now everything is being turned off and taken away. I trusted him to be the sole supporter after working my whole life. I guess i shouldn't have.

I'm praying it doesn't take long to get back on my feet. Thank you for reading all of this. I appreciate you taking so much time. God bless everyone on here! Thank you so much!!

prayers and well wishes are important to me too. Nobody likes to feel this alone.