Battle cancer,renal failure,heart disease & stroke

Dear 2023, Last year for New Year’s Eve I was in New York City at The Stand Comedy Club watching Janeane Garafalo, Joe Derosa and many others do stand up. The year before that I was at an impromptu skit comedy show in Savannah for New Years. The year before that I was in Vegas at a 24 hour Irish Pub literally hanging out at a bar one seat down from Coolio. This year you threw me a curve ball. I knew I had been sick for some time, but I thought my symptoms were related to my kidney disease. This past summer, I knew I was getting worse, as I spent the summer pretty much bed ridden or couch ridden. It took all of my energy to even make it to the bathroom or the kitchen. Sometimes I would go over 48 hours without eating as much as a cracker. I continued to report my symptoms to my doctors and was continually told, “We don’t know what is causing it”. Hyperventilating, coughing, nausea, lack of energy, explosive diarrhea, daily vomiting, headaches, etc, became the new norm. I started the new school year with hopes that I would feel better; however, you had different plans. Around the 3rd week of school I was sent to the Emergency room from urgent care due to a fear of pneumonia and complications with my renal function. I spent a week in the hospital in renal failure with severe bronchitis and a sinus infection. A CT scan showed several “nodules” in my lungs. The one Pulmonologist in Douglas said it was nothing to worry about but that he wanted to do a PET scan to be on the safe side. The hospital and my doctor’s office was unable to get Blue Cross Blue Shield of Georgia to approve the procedure. I am a public school teacher with insurance through the state. I played society’s game. My right wing friends say, “You want good insurance, get a good job.” So I did. Over the course of the past five years, my state Blue Cross Blue Shield plan has refused to pay for my kidney medication injections, along with several other procedures. I started to feel like Walter White from Breaking Bad. Make no mistake, if you work for Blue Cross or any other medical insurance company, I do not know how you sleep at night. You sold your soul. You may say, “well, all the people that work there are not bad”. That may be true, but you still work voluntarily for a company that allows people to die or become more sick to save a nickel. If you work for one of these companies, I compare it to that of working for Satan, Hitler or Mussolini. I hope you feel shame. My pulmonary doctor here in Douglas referred me to the Mayo Clinic to see if they could get the ball rolling on the tests I needed. Blue Cross Blue Shield immediately denied coverage. My doctor had to call in a favor to a doctor that he knows there to get their insurance department to do whatever it took to get me approved. With an inside connection, I was able to get a the procedure approved. The pulmonary doctor at Mayo assured me that he did not think it was cancer but that I had some type of auto immune disease. Nevertheless, as you probably know, the biopsy was positive for multiple malignant carcinoid tumors in my lungs. According to the Oncologist, there are too many to do surgery and chemotherapy/radiation are not effective treating this type of rare cancer. She refused to give me an estimate of my life expectancy without a possible treatment. I started throwing numbers out there in a panick and she repeatedly replied, “no, I am sorry”. So I continued to lower my number. I got down to 6 or 7 years and she finally humored me and said it is possible to live that long with my prognosis if it is diagnosed early enough; however, she will know more when they get the results from my PET scan. It will show if the cancer has spread anywhere else in my body. Nevertheless, I have been having these symptoms for almost 4 years. Coffee Regional Medical Center did a CT scan in 2021 and misdiagnosed the nodules as two small tears in my lungs that would heal themselves and that they could not be the cause of my symptoms. Well, they were wrong. The nodules have grown and multiplied and they are in fact killing me. Now it is too late to cut them out. The doctor’s skeptical timeline and my 4 year history of Carciniod Syndrome has me worried. I fear this could be my last New Years. I am hoping for at least a couple more, but if you know me, you know I am a pessimist but also a realist. So this year, for the first time in decades, I am not enjoying libations, a destination celebration, or the company of friends. I am hanging with my dog Jack, drinking orange Gatorade zero and watching Anderson and Andy take shots of tequila on CNN. If this is the last one, don’t feel sorry for me. I lived my life with the advice of Hunter S. Thompson in mind.

Now my 40th birthday is approaching. This year it falls on President's day. For my birthday, I could really use help with the existing medical bills and future procedures to keep me comfortable in the last few years. I was not going to make a GoFundMe for this but I figure if Alyssa Milano can raise money for her son to go to the Super bowl, why can't a sick public school teacher make one for an overbearing amount of medical debt that our government should stepping in and helping being that I am a public school teacher....