Give Teresa a Chance to Breathe on Her Own Again

Hello, my name is Scottie Futch. As the long time primary caregiver, I am reaching out to those of you who would be interested in helping my mother achieve her goal of having properly working lungs once more. People take breathing for granted, but for someone who suffers from illness like my mother, every breath is literally a fight for survival.

That said.

My mother, Teresa Futch, has a chance to get a lung transplant at Duke Medical here in North Carolina. While her insurance can pay for the procedure itself, we will have to pay a lot of out of pocket costs for travel, lodging, and possible expenses for medical care not included in the insurance.

A little backstory for you.

Approximately around the year 2009, My mother, Teresa Futch was diagnosed with lung cancer in her lower left lobe. She carried it for around two years due to lack of money and insurance, but in around 2011 we met with a doctor who said he would do the procedure. The procedure was a lower lobectomy. She was not given chemo, or anything like it. The mass was highly contained, so the surgeon chose to go straight to surgery.

As it turned out, the cancerous mass was larger than the CT scans and X-rays showed and he took a little more of her lung than he originally intended just to be certain that he got it all and that it would hopefully never return.

From what we have seen thus far that was the right call. Her lung cancer has been in remission since that day.

However, cancer of that type rarely exists in a vacuum. There are usually accompanying concerns.

My mother was no different.

She had developed COPD over the decades, which for those who do not know stands for Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disorder/Disease.

COPD is an umbrella term that could mean many different ailments. Her specific issues were Severe Emphysema and Chronic Bronchitis.

Originally, she was only on oxygen for a few weeks after the lung surgery. A year or two later her COPD progressed and she needed oxygen at night when she slept.

Another year or so down the road, she needed 2 liters of oxygen even while she was awake. Time passed. She had many flareups, or exacerbations of her health concerns. For those who do not know the meaning of those words, it basically means her bronchial tubes or the lining of her lungs became inflamed and her disease worsened a little.

She is still active enough to get around, and she largely takes care of herself with assistance from me. She can bathe herself, walk short distances if she turns her oxygen up to three or four liters, and drives herself. The only things she does not tend to do are cooking and taking out the trash.

The former, cooking, is almost as difficult for her as bathing due to the humidity, scent and heat.

As for the trash?

She's someone's mother. Why should she have to take out the trash? What's the point in having kids if they can't even take out the trash?

For the record, I do the cooking and the vast majority of any lifting, carrying, or taking out of things. I mostly feed the critters, remove any wild critters that get into the house like snakes, the occasional lost possum, or whatever, and do vehicle maintenance. I help her make sure she has the right medicines, look up side effects and interactions, help her negotiate the wonderful world of paying bills through the phone or the Internet which have user interfaces and pointless nonsense that seem to trouble her at times. Though, for some reason she's perfectly capable of figuring out Facebook, various photo filters, and apps where she sings karaoke.

Go figure.

At any rate, in the early years of her disease the doctors kept saying things like, "You'll be bedridden soon."

Other highlights from her conversational reel are:

Something said by a particular doctor once, "Don't call on god, you're going to die from this disease."

And of course the personal mantra of one particular medical ray of sunshine, "I don't see you making it another two years."

That sort of thing has been said to her ever since 2009 or so. She did not die within those first two years, the next, or the next. She is not bedridden and wanders around on her own, though admittedly at a pace she can handle. Even going to the mail box or walking from the parking lot to a store can be a struggle. At least, most stores have shopping carts to push which can help her. As for places that do not offer such, she has a walker she can sit down on, one of those flip up seat deals that come in handy for when she has to walk long distances for medical appointments when there are no handy wheelchairs or motorized carts available.

Now then, after all these years her disease has progressed to the point where she has about twenty-one percent of the lung capacity of a healthy person. She can keep her oxygen saturation in the 90s when she sits around, but it drops badly when she walks or does other things, especially when she has a cold or allergies. Thus, she has reached a critical point in her healthcare journey. We contacted her pulmonary doctor and asked about transplant options.

He used to tell her it was pointless to get on 'the list' unless you were bedridden. He did not say that this time. He only nodded and asked her if she was sure.

She was sure.

He scheduled an appointment with Duke Medical here in North Carolina, and they are anything but slow about the transplant process. There is no waiting for years on a donor list. In fact, there is no waiting for even a year, it seems.

Not long after the appointment was made, we had to head over to Durham, NC. This is over an hour and a half drive for us, which is the actual problem here, and ultimately why this GoFundMe campaign exists.

We will need to be available readily for appointments, rehabilitation prior to the surgery, and be able to arrive at the hospital within a minimum of two hours for the surgery. So, they want us to be within a half hour's drive maximum.

Ultimately, this means that my mother and I will need to pack up and move an hour closer to the hospital. The cost of living in the area is not low, and the hospital has it as a requirement that at a minimum we need to secure $10,000 as a show of ability to support ourselves financially and find housing. In this regard, even a motel room is considered housing, but it has to be in the area.

$10,000 is the bare minimum and the financial person at Duke told us that it will probably cost considerably more than that when rent typically runs between $1,400 to $2,500 for anything in Durham itself from what I have seen. The cheapest motel I have found is on the higher end of that financial spectrum monthly as well.

Add to that housing cost, groceries, travel costs, and the fact that I will be missing a lot of opportunities to work and earn money. I am a work from home author, but I don't exactly make George R. R. Martin money. Not even close.

The most concerning part, other than concerns about the dangers of the transplant itself, is the fact that we may need to move house for up to half a year, possibly a little longer. Appointments, rehab for a month, a fifteen day window where the donor lungs could come at any time, then the month or so she would be in the hospital post transplant should there be no complications. After that comes the after care, emergency concerns due to the possibilities of infection, injury, rejection, deflation, leakage, and so forth. According to one of the doctors on the team, 100% normality is achieved after around a year and those first few months are a real hardship with lots of possibilities for things to go wrong.

Her survival odds are good, but she needs to be close by to the hospital in case of emergencies that could easily crop up. It's that simple.

The main medical bills, less some co-pays or whatever that might come up along with a few other last minute tidbits, are paid by insurance... and thankfully so. The operation itself is going to cost well over a million dollars through insurance.

My mother is in what Duke's professionals are calling 'The Sweet Spot'. Her condition is bad enough to warrant the transplant, but she is still healthy enough to have a reasonable chance of surviving it.

Other than a few vaccinations that she needs to get updated, and a few more pounds she needs to pack on as a safety net, she has no other roadblock besides the need to move house.

By donating, you can give a scared but hopeful woman a chance to breath easier again, or at all really. There, as always, is far more to her story than what is being said here. However, what has been said is already quite personal and anything more is something that might cross into the territory of 'Too Much Information'.

As for why I am raising funds on her behalf? Due to the possibility that such funds might cause issues with her disability, social security, medicaid, medicare, and so on. There is no guarantee that this would cause problems, but it was mentioned as a possibility by the financial advisor at Duke Medical. Thus, any funds gathered would go to me and I would accept them to help me pay for all relevant additional medical fees, travel costs, lodging, housing, and what have you. Any tax related concerns regarding this campaign would thus, also come out of my pocket or these funds if said concerns exist.

Thank you all for reading this.

Thank any of you who thought to care a little after doing so.

Especially, I thank anyone who chooses to donate and help.

Bless you all.