On May 4, we woke up to no power. Mom is 75. Travis has congestive heart failure. We sat in the Miami heat for over fourteen hours before we could scrape together enough to pay the minimum on the electric bill and get the lights back on. We are two months behind on the mortgage. We are behind on the utilities and the rest of the bills too. That's where we are right now.
My name is Natascha. I'm raising money for my brother Travis, my 75-year-old mom, and me. The three of us live together in a house we own in Miami-Dade.
In October 2019, Travis was treated for an "unknown form of pneumonia" in Knoxville and sent back on the road. He kept driving because he was an owner-operator and nobody got paid if he didn't. On February 13, 2020, he collapsed in his truck in Augusta, Georgia. Our dog Sophie and I were in the cab with him. By the time he was admitted, he was already in a coma. Two days later he was in a medically induced coma so they could finish a tracheostomy his body had violently rejected. He stayed in that coma for two and a half months. When they tried to bring him back the first time, he flatlined. The team stepped out for the paddles. By the time they walked back in, his heart had restarted on its own.
End-stage heart failure. End-stage liver failure. End-stage kidney failure. The hospital prepared us for him not waking up. They told us he was gone. He woke up anyway. They said he'd need a nursing home for the rest of his life and gave him three to five years if he was lucky. Instead he changed how he ate, fought his way through it, and his ejection fraction came back close to normal, his liver fully regenerated, and his kidneys came back to 100 percent. He had to relearn how to walk, talk, and write. He went from a wheelchair to a walker to a cane. He still uses the cane.
While he was still recovering, he took cybersecurity classes online and landed a remote IT job in early 2022. His body kept putting him back in the hospital. In September 2023, they found a cancerous lesion on his appendix. Emergency surgery, removed it. He has been cancer-free for a year and a half. His job put him on long-term disability for one year instead of the standard two. That ran out in July 2024 and he was let go.
He first applied for SSDI at the end of 2022 and has been denied multiple times since. Social Security's own neurology specialist said he should be approved. They denied him anyway. His own primary care doctor put it in writing to his disability insurer: Travis cannot work more than two hours a day, cannot speak more than five to seven minutes, cannot lift any weight, cannot walk unassisted. Lifelong. Travis drives anyway. The mortgage doesn't care what his doctor wrote down.
He runs Empower rideshare at night to keep us afloat. He used to make $1,500 to $2,000 a week with Uber Premier until they deactivated him over a license-plate-frame issue. The law was just revised, decorative plate frames aren't illegal anymore, and his attorney expects it to be dismissed. Clearing it up will take months. Empower is new and demand is low, so right now it brings in about 15 to 25 percent of what Uber and Lyft did.
I have my own situation. Three spinal surgeries. Adrenal gland deficiency that has put me into adrenal crisis in my sleep and at work. I lost a job that way. Hypoglycemia and dumping syndrome on top of it. I have my Associates of Science in Medical Billing and Coding, 4.0 GPA, High Honors and Dean's List. I earned that recovering from those spinal surgeries on Dilaudid. I was denied SSDI and I'm appealing. Uber denied me. Lyft denied me. I work Empower, Instacart, and DoorDash. I'm working toward my medical billing certification exam, but I can't afford the time or cost to sit for it right now.
Mom is 75, retired, on Social Security. She is managing Type 2 diabetes and a heart rhythm disorder. She's been holding the line as long as she can. She can't carry three adults on a fixed income.
We are not passive. We used Florida's PACE program to fix the leaking roof, the termite-eaten front door, the original windows, and the rotted garage doors. PACE is why our mortgage went from $1,200 to $1,898. We took on more cost to fix the house responsibly. The math just stopped mathing before the disability process can resolve.
Our goal is $15,000. That stops the bleeding on the mortgage and the bills and gives us about four to six weeks of cushion after that.
If you can give, anything helps. We will feel every dollar. If you can't give, please share. Sharing is free and it could change everything for us. We were raised in Miami-Dade where you give before you ask. Asking for help when you truly need it isn't weakness, it's wisdom.
Thank you for seeing us.