Hi. My name is Angelica Booker, and I’m here to tell you about my best friend Sara Kinrade. Sara and I met at work over a decade ago, probably closer to two, now. She is geeky, funny, smart, kind, a little goofy. She’s everything I needed in a friend. She used to drive me an hour home from work without ever complaining, because that’s who she is. Now, she’s the one who needs help, but she’s too stubborn to ask for it, so here I am.

Frankly, Sara’s 2022 sucked. I know a lot of us can say that, but for real, check this out: Back in August she was sick – the kind of sick where you can’t breathe, can’t move, can’t sleep because you can’t lay down. It wasn’t COVID, but it also didn’t go away. Her doctor told her it was a Rhinovirus and should clear up in a week or two. A month later she was still sick. The doctor told her it would just take time and to push through. She did, still going to work because she was told she had to. She could barely make it to the bathroom and couldn’t think straight, so her work performance started suffering and they started getting upset with her. So, Sara went back to the doctor a third time, now having been sick for like six weeks, and begged them to do some sort of testing. The hospital drew her blood and not twenty minutes later they were calling her to tell her she was so anemic that she could die and she had to return to the hospital immediately. After more tests they found out she was in kidney failure. She was admitted with end stage renal disease.

This whole time she’d been “powering through”, working full-time and being a mom, she was literally dying.

After six days in the hospital, away from her four-year-old little boy, she was released to go home and start dialysis. She goes in to get the waste cleaned from her blood three times a week and each session is four hours long. The dialysis sessions leave her weak and exhausted and she was forced to stop working and take unpaid Family Medical Leave (FMLA), because she can’t work full-time. Even though she’s worked for the State of Maine since 2015, she was a contractor for most of that time and only got hired as an actual state employee two years ago. Why is that important, you might wonder? Because that means she can’t get long-term disability, because she wasn’t an employee long enough. She has applied for Social Security Disability, but there’s no guarantee it will be approved. In fact, most get denied the first time they apply. Also, since she’s been paying into a pension fund rather than social security, as a public employee, so she doesn’t have as much to draw from in social security benefits anyway and if she finally gets approved it would be about half of what she was making.

Sara’s protected leave ran out December 12th, and you know what that means, right? Now her job can fire her. She applied under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) for more leave, hoping she could get through until January 1st when she’d have more protected leave time available, but it was denied. Now, her family will have one income instead of two and she won’t have her own health benefits. Meanwhile, her copays for dialysis are $3000 a month! THREE THOUSAND. I didn’t accidentally add another zero in there. That’s with insurance. Which she’s losing. She can go on her husbands, except it costs a lot more than they have right now. There isn’t any assistance at this time to help pay for insurance, let alone the $700 a month for daycare, rent, or any of the medical bills they have piling up from the hospital.

Now, I told you in the beginning her year really sucked, and so far the story I’ve told does suck pretty badly, but it’s only the beginning. On top of all of this, Sara’s landlord sold her building without telling her back in March. The new landlord told them he was going to make all these great upgrades but their lease would stay the same. Except, no. He’s cutting their apartment in half to make two apartments and is raising her rent by 10%. He also sent them a bill for $1200 saying he had to hire a company to remove four tons of trash. Mind you, he didn’t tell them in advance and refuses to give them a list of what was removed. Their best guess is that it was building supplies, old appliances, and old cabinets the previous landlord had left in the yard. So, now they have to go to court to fight their landlord.

They’d like to move, but are in a lease, and when it’s up they don’t really think they’ll find anyplace to move in to, because now they’re on one income, have a young kid, and a big dog, and need a place that’s clean and safe for Sara to do home dialysis if she ever wants to get back to work. Their credit is shot because that adorable four-year-old bundle of energy of hers was born prematurely back in 2017 and had a long NICU stay, which they’ll never reasonably be able to pay off and the hospital won’t work out a decent repayment plan that they can afford. That means it’s all gone to collections.

That’s the gist of it. This amazing woman and her family have done everything they could to do things right. They got good jobs where they both helped people, they found as reasonably priced a place to live as they could, they have been giving their son the best life they can, and life has just kicked them in the gut at every turn. I honestly cry every time I think about it, and I’m mostly cried out (I can always find some more tears – I’m a crier) and now am just determined to make things right. I don’t have a magic wand and I haven’t won the lottery, so I can’t magically fix things, but I have a keyboard and can come forward and plead with others to help.

If you can spare anything at all, it will help. It will pay co-pays for dialysis. It will keep Sara’s son in daycare so she can heal and he can be with other kids. It will pay rent to their scumbag of a landlord so they can have a roof over their heads for now. It will put gas in the car so she can actually get to dialysis appointments and back. It will pay for food. If they’re lucky, it might buy a gift or two for Christmas. More than anything, it will help keep her alive, which a few months ago I wasn’t sure was going to be a thing.