Help Alisha battle CIDP

Alisha's story begins in January of last year - her and I (Craig Dollar) both came down with an illness that resembled the flu, but made us both more miserable than we can remember being in years. I got better; Alisha did not. I had to rush home from work one night, after she had called, telling me she couldn't breathe. I found her passed out, facedown, in her pillows. Alisha was admitted to the hospital the next day. She spent a few days in a regular hospital room, until her condition worsened, and she spent two days in the ICU until, thankfully, she started to get better. We were allowed to leave a couple days later, but I won't forget how a doctor told us that she was on so much oxygen it was essentially one step below full life support. 

Another thing that sticks in my mind about the experience was the flu test; at first it was negative, and a second test days later at the hospital returned positive. It isn't until months later the significance of this becomes clear: many cases of covid-19 presented in the same way, and the flu test would behave in that fashion in many cases. 

For a few months, things went back to whatever normal was in 2020. Until, around April 2020, Alisha started experiencing tingling, weakness, and pain in her hands and feet. It began affecting her ability to work. By the end of June, the pain in her feet had become so bad, she could not stand to walk on them. Gentle brushes against her limbs from the wrong material would get a reaction you would expect from a burn victim. Alisha has described the pain to me in a number of ways, each more terrible than the last to hear from a loved one. Shocked. Burning. Stabbing, slashing. It's a terrible thing to watch someone become a connoisseur of pain, to watch them begin to shrug off pains that other people would wince and grimace at. 

After months of this, we were finally able to get a fantastic neurologist on Alisha's case in August. At first, it seemed things would get better immediately. Alisha started on various medicines, her pain receded, she started physical therapy, and began regaining mobility. She was slowly clawing back what disease had taken from her. 

Unfortunately, disease wasn't done with her. In February of this year, Alisha had another flare up, this time making her hands useless with pain. She now requires me to take care of her for all of life's mundane, day-to-day tasks. We labor together everyday for her to get through this, one dose of medicine, one haircut, and one hot meal at a time. With this final flare-up also came the final diagnosis: CIDP, or chronic inflammatory demyelinating polyradiculoneuropathy. It was a particularly crushing piece of news because it means we will be learning to manage this illness, not defeat it. We are hoping that the relatively quick discovery and diagnosis of the disease will mean that the flare-ups can be stopped or managed early, and prevent as much damage as possible to Alisha's nervous system. Hopefully, in the coming months, she can once again begin learning to walk and use her hands again. 

Another twist of the knife - this kind of autoimmune disease is usually triggered by a bad virus. Alisha's neurologist believes that when she was sick in January 2020, she had Covid-19, which triggered the auto-immune attack. 

As you can well imagine, an event like this in someone's life brings financial ruin to them very quickly. We are roughly $15,000 dollars in debt just in hospital bills alone. I won't even add in the expenses of all the different doctors we've seen, or the things we've had to buy for Alisha's quality and convenience of life, or the fact that I have had to be out of work to help Alisha. It is during this time that we hope our community and the people we know and care for will lend a hand, and make sure that we can get through this intact. I have been touched by the response so far, and I am positive that I will continue to be impacted by the compassion that people have for what Alisha has been through.