Support Christine's Journey to Recovery

I am writing to ask you to please consider donating to help pay for my friend of almost 40 years, Christine Szymanski's medical expenses so that existing and ongoing medical bills are not an additional source of stress for her and her family in this difficult time. In June of this year, Christine experienced a severe vascular injury to her brain related to a new medication she was taking. In less than 12 hours, Christine went from working a normal day at her job to intubated and in critical condition in the ICU after emergency brain surgery. For the first couple of weeks in the ICU, nobody knew if she was going to survive or regain any kind of meaningful consciousness again. Anyone who knows Christine knows how strong of a person she is, and she fortunately was able to recover enough over several weeks to finally be able to leave the hospital after a long and difficult recovery and transfer to an in-patient rehabilitation center. Weeks after that, she left rehabilitation to stay with her older sister, Erin, and her wife, Ace.

I visited with Christine while she was in the ICU right after the injury and then again a couple weeks ago. Her progress is amazing! She has to wear a helmet for protection until another surgery can be performed to replace the part of her skull that was removed to alleviate the pressure in her brain, but she was able to visit with me, chat a bit, and take a short walk. The major challenge she is facing is that her language abilities were severely impacted by what happened to her. She struggles to come up with the words for what she is trying to say and has a hard time processing a long string of words in conversation. As a person passionate about writing and science, this is extremely frustrating for her and also very scary, because she is not sure what the future will hold in terms of her career and going back to what gives her joy in life. The prognosis for her language ability is not clear at this point, and she has a very long road to recovery. She will need ongoing speech, cognitive, and physical therapy as well as a second surgery.

Please consider supporting Christine with whatever size of donation you can spare so she can focus on doing the hard work of getting better. Thank you!