Financial aid for Brandon Smith's Urgent Medical Needs

My sister Debbie Retaskie and I are reaching out for financial support from our family, friends and community to help our Brother Mark and Marie Smith’s Son, Brandon Smith and his Wife Kristine during this very difficult time.

The very shortened version is that

Brandon’s health has deteriorated very fast over the past year and there have not been any answer's until this past week, yet still he is not out of the woods by any means.

Since thanksgiving Brandon has been hospitalized four times and three of them have been out of town as our hospital wasn’t able to diagnose him correctly,

Kristine has been by his side this entire time and has been unable to work herself.

The bills keep piling up and then there is the expense of needing to travel as Brandon’s an unusual medical case. We are asking for your help to ease the financial burden some. As we all know any little bit counts!

Brandon and Kristine are in Milwaukee right now at froedtert hospital trying to figure out the next steps on his healing journey.

Brandon has a very rare blood disease , a brain bleed (which is under control at the moment) and he is also is in need of a liver transplant.

Here, I am attaching what Kristine wrote telling their exact story if you kindly would take the time to read it.

You are, unfortunately, what we call an ‘interesting case.’ That’s not a good thing when it comes to health.”

We have been hearing this a lot lately from a lot of different doctors. Brandon’s health issues have been called unusual, complex, difficult…a lot of things you don’t want to hear while you’re in the hospital. The many different health professionals that have attended to my husband all seem to agree that there is a long and difficult road to recovery ahead of us.

My name is Kristine Smith, and my husband is Brandon Smith. Neither of us would normally share personal details like this online, but it has become increasingly apparent that I need help to keep him alive.

He wasn’t well enough to work very much last year, so we’ve been getting by on just my income, paycheck to paycheck, as the medical bills pile up.

If anyone feels kind enough to donate to our cause, the funds would go toward those bills, living expenses, and travel expenses as we keep getting transported to different hospitals.

A little background:

Brandon Smith’s health issues first began in late 2017 when he began to experience frequentheadaches. After initially being told that they were tension headaches and that he should take ibuprofen, he could tell that there was something more going on. After going back to the doctor and then getting a couple scans, it was revealed that there was a sort of mass in his skull.

On January 15, 2018, Brandon underwent a craniectomy. The mass in question turned out to be a bone lesion caused by a very rare condition called Langerhans cell histiocytosis. This cancer-adjacent disease is what happens when a person’s body produces too many immature

Langerhans cells–a type of immune cell known as a histiocyte. The cells build up and cause tumors and damage to tissue, organs, and bone. This condition is most commonly seen in young children, and is estimated to affect 1 in 1-2 million people. There is no known cause.

The lesion in Brandon’s skull was caught before it penetrated the membrane, thankfully. He was patched up with titanium mesh and recovered from the surgery. A follow-up skeletal scan did not reveal any more bone lesions, giving us a huge sense of relief. Things were looking up.

Fast forward a few years later, shortly after my father succumbs to cancer and Brandon and I finally tie the knot… he’s not doing so well. Brandon has suffered from chronic plaque psoriasis for years, and it started to get out of hand. The plaques on his body started to crack open and bleed profusely. I would bandage him up a couple times a day as well as I could, and cuts just didn’t seem to clot, or if they did, they would break open again quickly.

For months, his skin impacted his ability to work, as the physical labor of carpentry caused physical distress to his

skin. He went back to the doctor and got a referral for a dermatologist. He was put on a new trial medication - Sotyktu.

The Sotyktu seemed to start working right away. Within a few weeks, the plaques began to clear up and his face looked less inflamed… but it still didn’t look quite right. He was turning yellow.

Brandon’s lab work showed that his liver enzymes were elevated, and he was severely anemic. He began going to get blood work done every week to check his hemoglobin. He got several blood transfusions. He’s been getting many tests and scans. He cut back significantly on

drinking and smoking, eventually quitting both unhealthy vices altogether…but he still didn’t feel or look healthy.

On Thanksgiving, shortly after dinner, he threw up a good amount of blood. An ambulance brought him to the UPHS - Marquette emergency room.

From there, we were transferred via Guardian Flight to the intensive care unit of Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit. There they performed many tests. They told us he had hemolytic anemia, meaning that his body wasn’t producing enough healthy red blood cells, and the ones he was producing were breaking down prematurely. They said his liver wasn’t looking good, but they didn’t see a correlation between it and what was going on with his blood.

They couldn’t tell us what was causing it, and we were sent home after a week. He was told to stop taking the Sotyktu, continue to abstain from alcohol, and to keep getting his blood checked.

About six weeks later, Brandon gets a small cut on his finger. We bandaged it up, but the next day the bandage was saturated with blood. I brought him to Urgent Care. It was too late for them to give him stitches, so they tried cauterizing the wound, unsuccessfully. A drip of lidocaine and epinephrine were also unsuccessful. He was bandaged up and sent to the ER for stitches and was ultimately transported to St Vincent Hospital in Green Bay.

At St Vincent, after many tests, scans, and a scope, they determined that he has a double whammy of cirrhosis and disseminated intravascular coagulation (DIC). DIC is a rare and life-threatening condition that causes abnormal blood clotting issues. It can be treated by

treating the underlying cause, which in this case means a liver transplant.

A short while after coming home from St Vincent, Brandon was feeling very weak and was unable to walk on his own. I brought him to the emergency room again where testing revealed that he has a blood infection and a brain bleed. The brain surgeon told me that he would be unable to perform brain surgery due to the DIC. He was transported again, this time to Froedtert Hospital in Milwaukee. He is currently there in the Neuroscience ICU receiving further evaluation and treatment as I type this at a nearby hotel.

If anyone has read this far, thank you so much for listening to our story and considering helping my husband. If you are able to donate, we would be undyingly grateful. If you are not able to donate, we would appreciate it if you could share this page.

Also, if you aren’t an organ donor,

please consider how much it could help someone like Brandon. Donations of blood and plasma have kept him going this far, too, so a big thank you to those who helped sustain him in that way as well.