Help Amber Get the Chair They Need

When I say there’s no one quite like Amber, I’m telling the absolute truth. It’s not every day that one meets such a brilliant, compassionate, hilarious, and strong-willed person. As much as I’d like the rare circumstances to end there, they don’t. Amber’s medical battles are truly unique, and their health care needs are overwhelming.

Amber lives with celiac disease, rheumatoid arthritis, lupus SLE, and Systemic Sclerosis. Those last two may become life-threatening. Any one of those situations alone is a lot, but the compounded situation allows no breaks from the process of managing Amber’s health, and they can’t do it alone.

For the past two years, Amber has had to adjust to life in a wheelchair. Don’t get me wrong, they make it look good with their snarky tee-shirts and their lap full of kittens! However, the reality is that this adjustment has been difficult, emotional, and expensive. Some of you may remember when we raised money a couple years ago to help with the cost of a used power chair and some of the remodeling that has been necessary to make their house accessible.

Now, Amber is in need of a NEW manual chair, one made specifically for them. There are consequences to not having a chair fit for your body, especially when you are smaller than the average person. Amber is about 5’1”, making them too small to use over-the-counter models.

Chairs that are too wide hurt the shoulders and give too much space for the hips, causing sciatica and other hip-related issues. Additionally, having too wide a chair not only cocks the elbows out when pushing, putting extreme pressure on the rotator cuffs, but also bends the spine forward, increasing the injury to the spine and enhancing the already-backward-curved cervical spine curve. Chairs that are too tall are dangerous to transfer in and out of, and the incorrect placement of the shoulders causes pressure sores on the shoulder blades. Amber has the scars and receipts to prove all of these things.

Furthermore, exercise is necessary for everyone, and regular time in the manual chair is the only exercise available to Amber right now. Maintaining muscle tone is critical to mitigating some of the pain caused by their health.

Of course, like so many other processes in our health care system, the gauntlet of appointments and tests to get a fitted chair is a maze of gatekeeping and red tape. Seven medical professionals have signed off as this chair being medically necessary. Amber has already spent $1,000 in co-pays just to get through the hoops of finding out what a chair for them would actually cost.

We’ve just learned that the retail cost of the chair is about $10,000. If insurance approves the claim, the price after insurance and before taxes is $1,979.64. If insurance does not approve the claim, this fundraising goal will change. Amber has thousands of friends on social media, and they’ve touched so many of those lives for the better through their advocacy work. My hope is that a couple hundred of those friends will donate at least $10. In the meantime, thank you for reading this far. Whatever you can contribute is greatly appreciated!