If you’ve met my daughter Ariana (maybe you’re a friend of hers or a friend of mine or a client of her amazing Providence dog walking business Wiggle Walkers) you know that she is a remarkable human. In addition to being creative, kind, generous, and committed to others’ empowerment, she is remarkably independent under anything close to neutral circumstances.

These are not currently neutral circumstances, and she needs help.

We want her and her husband Tyler to keep their home and we want her to keep her leg and regain her health, and if you stop here, that’s the essence of what I hope to convey below. But whether or not you are able to donate to this fundraiser, I invite you to read on to get a sense of what she’s been going through.

It’s difficult to pinpoint when the medical challenges became acute, as some have presumably been ongoing for years and she’s such a tough cookie that she’s been powering through, but it all began to come to a head about a year ago. At that point, she was hospitalized with severe anemia and dangerously low hemoglobin (“how did you even walk in here of your own volition?!” they wondered), which, in tandem with previously-undiagnosed adenomyosis, also were leading to infection, fever, severe nausea, and the non-healing and worsening of an initially innocuous cellulitis/leg wound from months prior (just to name some of the most fun symptoms). The medical system being what it is, the bills piled up (in spite of insurance) and the follow-up care did not.

Fast forward, and as of this writing she is healing from major leg surgery #3 in less than two weeks (having already had two in February, after landing back in the hospital with sepsis and severe osteomyelitis), and let me tell you, speaking as a pretty medically complex person myself, this is some gnarly stuff. The path forward is unfolding in real time and additional consequential medical procedures are slated for the coming months, including at least one more leg surgery and a likely-complicated hysterectomy.

Her capacity to work has been significantly diminished by all this time of impaired wellness, not to mention the weeks in the hospital. While some percentage of her work can be done while physically incapacitated (boarding, admin work when she’s not too ill), the majority is the boots-on-the-ground work that serves as her bread and butter. That has gone from impaired to nonexistent a few times over the past year, with the current moment representing the longest and most consequential period of being unable to walk between surgeries, recovery, waiting around for days in the hospital as procedures get postponed due to administrative logjams, and so on.

She continues to fulfill her responsibilities and pay her staff but the bucks are not rolling in at this moment, exacerbated by some significant unexpected financial burdens relating to their house. And of course these things compound – already-complicated logistical issues become all the more difficult to navigate when in a constant state of illness. Tyler is doing an extraordinary job, but the fact that it would take four people working full time to deal with all of this is not surmountable by big-heartedness and gumption alone, and his own impactful job as an educator is new enough that he isn’t yet eligible for any sort of family medical leave.

And for a thick dose of spoiled mayo on the proverbial poo sandwich, they lost the original Wiggle Walker, their exceptional and exceptionally beloved dog Lucy over the past week, with less than three days from cancer diagnosis to passing. In addition to the unfortunately-timed need to deeply grieve from a hospital bed (thankfully Lucy got to visit there on her last full day, charming everyone as usual), there have been some unexpected expenses there too.

That all this is happening at once is frankly so absurd that it sounds like a bad movie script that needs editing to be credible. But wow, is it definitely not fiction. And this isn’t even the whole of it, but I have to stop somewhere . . .

Not that even mediocre-or-worse humans deserve to suffer or find themselves in precarious situations, but this feels especially cruel. Ariana has run her business and thus built her impressive livelihood from a deliberately anti-capitalist framework, emphasizing humane conditions and fair pay for her staff and treating her human and canine clients with a level of care well beyond basic professional necessity. Under (here we go again) anything resembling neutral circumstances, she does well enough to live comfortably, manage being a relatively new homeowner, and engage in substantial under-the-radar philanthropy, even while not prioritizing the lining of her own pockets at the expense of others. This is at least somewhat apparent to her clients and friends, and at the same time not many folks get to see the heavy level of behind the scenes work, commitment to mentorship, and general walking-the-walk of the benevolent principles that guide her existence. Her experiences as a foster kid make her especially sensitive to the underdog, and that she’s evermore choosing to stoke the fires of perspective, gratitude, and hope day after day in the hospital is difficult for me to wrap my brain around, but it’s sure inspiring.

So where we find ourselves now, the confluence of challenges means some significant short-term expenses to tread water enough to a) keep her house, b) cover medical bills (both existing and future, given the track record of insurance denying claims for certain doctor-ordered tests and procedures), and c) ease back into the walking part of her job gradually enough that she can preserve the gains from these surgeries and remain a two-legged beacon for the four-legged.

The exact amount of financial help she needs is uncertain, particularly given the fluidity of how long recovery will take, which procedures insurance will deny, and so on. Even being up here in RI for the past week has been a sobering lesson for me in how quickly a circumstance like this can lead to mounting expenses (parking garage fees! meals picked up instead of cooked! replacing my scarf lost while wandering between hospital and car in a daze! late fee on a bill that required an implausible in-person conversation! oh my!) but we’re mostly concerned with the big-ticket items here – mortgage (and attendant costs, e.g. taxes and insurance), utilities, medical bills, final (sigh) vet bills.

The positive side of all of this is that she’s alive (which, at the risk of sounding melodramatic, has not seemed to be a clear-cut outcome at a few points in this journey), and the future is looking promising. The likelihood is increasing that she’ll be back to business (literally and figuratively) as usual in the foreseeable future, though in a sense better than ever because of the perspective she has gained through this hardship and the enhanced gratitude for the things it’s so easy for most of us to take for granted under (one more time) neutral circumstances. Will you consider helping her weather the current storm to get there?