A Sailor’s Stand Against MS (Multiple Sclerosis)

Hello! For those of you who don’t know me, my name is Kimmie and I live on a fixer upper sailboat with my fiancé James. When he’s not working at Home Depot or the coffee shop and I’m not waiting tables, we’re busy rebuilding the beautiful 46 foot boat that we call home. We call her Bella, but her full name is Better Late than Never.

The past six weeks have been a whirlwind of doctors appointments, testing, and phone calls to insurance as we have tried to pin down the unusual new symptoms that James has been experiencing. In the past 72 hours or so we have gone from 3 MRI’s on Wednesday, to the Neurologist Thursday, and finally arrived in the Miami ER around midnight. After additional MRI’s, multiple blood tests and a spinal tap this morning, we finally have an actionable diagnosis of MS- multiple sclerosis. Specifically RRMS, which is luckily the most manageable of the four kinds of MS.

James has been amazingly cool as a cucumber- despite being stabbed with at least a dozen needles in the past 72 hours in addition to all the other testing! While we are adjusting to the news and still figuring out how this affects our current path, we are incredibly grateful that we caught this early and that it is a very manageable condition. We are in good spirits, all things considered.

That said, the costs of all the appointments, testing, ambulance ride, and hospital stay have been staggering- and we have no idea what the price tag on the following outpatient care is going to be. James and I both have had to take many days off work already, and we’re not sure when he’ll be able to return. James does have insurance, but has a very high out of pocket to meet before they start to cover many of the costs.

As I mentioned above, many of our resources have been directed at renovating our 46’ sailboat that we call home, and as we both work in food service we are not currently in a position to be able to cover the medical costs alone. If there is any financial aid you are able to offer in this trying time, we would be forever grateful.