Hi, this fundraiser is to help Shane Braniff who is in desperate need of life saving brain surgery.

A few months back Castanet published a news article highlighting the grim reality of Interior Health’s waitlists. From April 1 2024 to March 31 2025 there were 4,620 deaths across the province of British Columbia, while on medical waitlists. Of those deaths, 1,586 were in the Interior Health region alone. That makes up a fairly large part of all deaths across the whole province. Almost 1/3. That is alarming.

Shane has been on a waitlist for multiple brain surgeries - brain surgeries that could save his life. He suffers from multiple conditions that are terminal when not treated by these life saving surgeries. He has a rare form of epilepsy that is centered in the left temporal lobe of his brain. This form of epilepsy has triggered multiple seizures at one time that have effectively caused damage that has tied certain veins in his brain into knots. So one of these surgeries needed will be to go in to untie these knots and increase the blood flow in his brain.

In the picture of his MRI, the left circle shows the dark spot where the vein has been crushed due to the pressure. The middle circle is the giant bulb where the vein is filled with blood because of the tangled veins. The circle on the right shows a kinked vein and just to the left of the circle on the right is another vein thats starting to swell up.

Another one of the conditions he suffers from is called "Idiopathic Intracranial Hypertension" or "Raised Intracranial Pressure". This means that there is an increased amount of brain fluid inside of his skull causing an immense amount of pressure on his brain, resulting in debilitating migraines, at times slurred speech, loss of certain motor functions, and overall loss of enjoyment of any kind of life he had before all of this came about.

Shane is not one to give up, he has been fighting day in and day out, every single day. If he does not receive these surgeries, he is going to die. He desperately wants to make it long enough to be able to walk his 2 year old son to kindergarten.

He has been on these waitlists for over a year and has not even gotten a phone call from a neurosurgeon to schedule a consult OR to tell him the name of the surgeries. It took 7 months of his wife and GP advocating daily for him to get diagnosed with epilepsy. After almost every neurologist in Kelowna misdiagnosed him and told him that the seizures were "all in his head", that they were "Psychogenic Non-Epileptic Seizures, they finally hooked him up to a 24 hour EEG which he took home. It showed that he had multiple seizures in his sleep and the doctors formed the opinion that he was epileptic. Then it took another 6 EEG’s for them to decide what kind of epilepsy it was, where in his brain the seizures were coming from, and that he also had a TBI. (Traumatic Brain Injury)

Shane needs surgery now. He cannot afford to continue to wait and he needs to go somewhere else for the surgery. After months of praying, God has put it on his heart to lay down his pride and just simply ask for help.

He will have to travel to where he can get the help he needs, so he will be able to continue to be there for his kids, and watch his son grow into a man.

The funds will be specifically used for travel and accommodations to get him to a hospital where the surgeries will be performed as well as accommodations for his wife and youngest son to stay while he recovers, to help cover costs of medication that currently are not covered by disability or under special authority (currently over $1,000/month out of pocket), other expenses that come up while he waits for surgery and to get him home safe to his family.

So please if you can see it in your heart to help Shane out and get him back to a place where he can be with his family, every dollar helps.