Hello everyone! It is with heavy hearts that Brad and I are coming to you with an urgent request for help.

If you are new to our journey, I want to take a moment and catch you up on what has happened to me and what Brad does for a living.

To start, this is the Reader's Digest version of what I have been through... Almost a decade ago, due to an insane allergic reaction to bug bites, I developed severe weeping wounds on both legs, especially bad on the lower left leg, which grew to be deep and raw as time went on, in spite of the efforts of the local Wound Care clinic and help from The Pain Clinic. By the time things went truly south, I had a wound all the way around the left leg (with the right one not much less severe) and almost 1/3 of an inch deep. Even with the help of heavy pain medications, I was having to supplement that with dangerously large doses of Tylenol and ibuprofen just to remain remotely functional and get any rest at night.

Then, on December 12, 2022 at 5:30am, I was taken by emergency ambulance to the local hospital. At that time, I was 45 mins from dying… according to the ER doctor. My kidneys had shut down and other organs were headed that way also. After being stabilized, I went to a stepdown hospital for a couple of weeks. I was then sent to a local nursing home that is so far from being somewhere you want to send a loved one that it is not funny.

I was there for a little over a week and everything started going backwards again .. I was taken to the hospital and they told me that I got there just in time before organs started shutting down again. That was in January of 2023…over three years ago now.

Since that day, on I have been in either the hospital or a nursing home, if we have figured up I have had 14 stays in a nursing. The longest one has been from February 2023 till September 2023, which I pushed myself to get home too soon and set myself up for the other stays. In the whole time this started I have now been a total of 10-11 months since 12/12/22.

As for my husband, Brad is a commercial illustrator for a book publisher in the hobby gaming industry (i.e., Dungeons and Dragons and their numerous competitors. At present, he has racked up over nine hundred paid credits working on products like Dungeons and Dragons itself, Traveller, BattleTech, and the DCC RPG from Goodman Games, for which h has been working for over twenty years. He has been an artist his whole life, including when he was around 4 years old and drew a realistic tree for his mom that she carried around with her til the day she died… some fifty years after.

A realist when it comes to difficulty of life as an artist, he has worked "normal" jobs also, working for a t-shirt printing company and for over 25 years for a local pizza chain. He has worked long and hard to be able to do just artwork every day and not have to go out and get a real-world job. At present, he divides his time between work primarily for Goodman Games and taking care of Jess, who due to her health problems, is an almost complete invalid.

First: the good news. My health has seemed stable for almost two months now.

The bad news is we need help making October's rent so that we have a place to stay. Our landlord will put an eviction notice on our door on the 6th if rent is not paid by the 5th. We have gone through it with her before.

Brad has had a demotion at work from a generous salary down to how many pages of work he can produce in a week. With unpredictable tariffs, economic uncertainty making people rethink their discretionary buying, and the increasing costs of groceries, gasoline, etc... It is a bad time and situation to work in a field dependent on discretionary spending.

Worse still, Brad had fallen into a deep depression; deeper than he realized until finally he reached out to his doctor for help. And... He’s allergic to the antidepressant. It actually made symptoms (depression, fatigue, dizziness) worse. He has stopped taking the medicine, and is getting back to his normal productivity, but the damage is done in terms of his career...

We are trying our best to pay all the bills and rent. I have sent paperwork for help with gas and electric and am hoping to hear something back soon, but most of the organizations are also feeling the pinch.

I have reopened Brad’s Etsy store and will be uploading new images soon! https://www.etsy.com/shop/BradMcDevittArtStore

Any small publishers can also help by stocking up on inexpensive art for their projects at :

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/publisher/384/Postmortem-Studios/category/4199/Clipart

Things are bad for a lot of people; we know and money is tight everywhere, so we feel we should let you know that any donations that are given will be used in this order.

1.) Rent

2.) Utilities (Gas/Electric)

3.) Other monthly bills, and if there is anything left over, then groceries... we both foresee lots of Ramen noodles and Mac and cheese in our future until this situation is resolved.

Thank you so much for taking the time to read this, for sharing, for donating, and for simply keeping us in your thoughts. We truly appreciate every bit of support and we would not be doing this if the situation was not dire. Feel free to like and share, and it is our sincere belief that everything will get better soon for all of us.

In the meantime, have a good day, Brad and Jess.