A helping hand for Angie with spinal cyst pain

A helping hand for Angie!

It is never easy to reach out and ask for help and this is specially the case for Angie and her family.

Angie is in her early 50’s and lives alone in a small cottage with her beautiful companion dogs Mara, Ben and two of their year and a half old puppies Jessie and Ruby, which Angie kept, thinking she was going to be working within a year after a very treatable rare Molar pregnancy cancer got cured in early 2018. The dogs have been everything to her during her illness and were going to be trained and registered as therapy dogs, so that people with illnesses and disabilities could benefit from the joy and love they bring.
She was completely cured of this rare illness thankfully.   But there had been an incidental finding of a benign spinal cyst during scans for the Molar Pregnancy in 2017.  Angie was still struggling with the side effects of the chemotherapy treatments that left her in a fragile place, when other symptoms crept up on her. 

Now it is the benign cyst that causes pressure and pressure erosion of the vertebra at T6, which in turn is causing Angie severe and continuous back pain, severe regular muscle spasms and numbness around the ribcage with tightness and breathing difficulties, muscle weakness, extreme lack of sleep and exhaustion as well as dizziness, digestion problems and heart racing.

Her mid-spine has gotten very stiff, with some short periods of relief given by Acupuncture and Physiotherapy treatments given last year.
She is being investigated by the Neurosurgeon with an MRI on February 8th next week for a possible Csf leak in her Thorax as her symptoms have worsened further after some exercise 3 weeks ago. Due to long waiting times with the Covid situation, Angie has asked to go private for this MRI.
Simple tasks, like driving a car, bringing in food or lifting a bucket of coal, bending, sitting or lying flat bring Angie agonising pain and make it hard to breathe. Her chest and breathing muscles are weakening due to the pressure of the cyst. 

As a health care assistant and horticulturalist, she is not able to work any longer and is solely relying on disability. She had hoped to return to work, and to further her degree in Horticulture by part-time training in Horticultural Therapy.   Angie has exhausted her savings to a minimum and has had to borrow from her Credit Union to expedite a diagnosis on her continuous back pain, to obtain pain relief and Physiotherapy, anything to help make the pain bearable. Due to the rare occurrence of this spinal cyst, the worsening symptoms were not thought to be related up until recently.

Despite financial support from family and friends over the past few years, Angie cannot get sufficient funds together for a second opinion on what can be done about the cyst and the pain and health problems that are going with it. She has caring family abroad, nearby friends and neighbours and her faith give her great hope that with an operation her pain will improve and that life will get better.

With the funds that Angie is hoping to raise with your help, Angie will get a second opinion, further MRI/CT'S, and help finance her travel and accommodation, treatment, physical pain relief and slowing her muscle loss, as well as taking care of her dogs during her absence. 

The funds needed are estimated at €5,000.

Any unused funds will be donated by Angie to Cancer Connect in West Cork, who helped her so much over the recent years by driving her to hospital and is an important life line to many cancer patients.

At age 54 and with a heart of Gold, Angie has a lot of life ahead of her to enjoy and with the help of your donation it might become a pain free future.

Angie, her family and friends will be grateful for any donation 


Thank you very much.

Angie Fallon
Dunmanway
Co Cork