TW: Severe illness, Medical Neglect, Mention of weight and Graphic descriptions of suffering
You may know her as skitz shady. But this is her real name
What Dana was Like 2 Years Before She Started To become Bedridden (And the person she remains to be despite it all):
Hi, my name is Emma, and I am making this for my close friend Dana Kay who has often gone by Skitz Shady, who has been chronically ill her entire life, but got really, really bad when she turned 19. She has been mostly bedridden behind four walls for all of her 20s fighting for answers and slowly dying in bed never really letting anyone know how bad it got.
She fought for so long, and at one point totally gave up and went into her room to let nature take its course. For nearly two years, Dana lay there barely able to use her phone, converse, or even have thoughts constantly getting sick up to 50x a day, laying in her own bodily fluids, trying not to get sick, (the feeling never went away). Managing 15/10 pain that was intractable or feeling like she was trapped in hell. Because she was and is. She couldn’t use her voice or even leave her room to see anyone else who lived in her house, her mother who she shared a wall with would go months without seeing her because she couldn’t even handle that much interaction. It was solitary confinement but worse because it was coming from inside her own body, she couldn’t even see her cats, unless it was to snap a quick photo while using the bathroom and quickly say goodbye.
This was because she was slowly dying from organ failure, and it had taken everything including her ability to be funny, which was the greatest loss of her life.
She got diagnosis after diagnosis that was always incorrect. Every time, she was excited to announce to her friends that she finally found answers and was going to get her life back, planning a future, buying shoes to wear finally as she only ever left the house for doctors appointments and telling people she couldn’t wait to see them soon. But every diagnoses, they were always wrong. Each time, she spent thousands of dollars on tests, treatments, doctors appointments, and invasive procedures, including an ICP bolt where a wire was drilled into her brain and she had to lay awake 24 hours with it. She drove from city to state looking for answers and going through so much when the real answer was simple all along. A lethal disease if left untreated that everyone’s heard of.
She’s had multiple surgeries, including a seven hour one that almost killed her from pulmonary edema and made her even sicker afterward. Sicker than she’d ever been. When she thought she couldn’t lose more she lost even more and after that surgery didn’t change her shirt for 6 months. She was THAT weak. So many unnecessary procedures all because of one misdiagnosis the entire time: Type 1 diabetes.
Two years ago, Dana went into acute end stage renal failure. Because her kidneys were slowly failing that entire time. Because she was given medications by EMTs to stop violent seizures, they labeled it as an accidental drug overdose because the medications where flagged on the system and she was prescribed certain meds for her symptoms. When she was actually in acute renal failure from undiagnosed diabetes and had gone into a diabetic coma. She woke up confused, covered in bruises and thought she had gotten in a car crash. She was in septic shock, renal failure, and internally bleeding still. She could no longer eat or drink and was vomiting up to 50 times a day, all from diabetic ketoacidosis. Her blood sugars were in the thousands by that point, as her pancreas had never produced insulin her entire life.
Dana always said her organs felt like they were rotting, decaying, and failing and she was right. The most heartbreaking part was finding out she was right and reliving every moment knowing that she missed out on everything and that it could have all been prevented. Something she may never mentally recover from
Her high blood sugars were documented off and on since age 12, and consistently again from ages 16-20, Including extremely high heart rates from the sugars. That would go as high as 200+ when a normal person on a treadmill or running would be 120-130. hers was always 120 resting and never went lower. Constantly in fight or flight and getting worse over time. No one said a word, even though she listed a rampant family history of diabetes at every doctor’s appointment.
When she was found unconscious in her room, she had been laying there for 18 hours. There was black blood all over the walls and pouring out of her mouth. She was wedged in a corner and had to be pulled onto the floor and in that moment her family was sure she was gone. She had not eaten or drank in 12 days. The black blood meant it was old and that her kidneys had been slowly bleeding and failing for a very long time.
Her eyes were open but glazed over and bloodshot. She was unresponsive, her mouth wide open, blood everywhere. A true crime scene. Her mother, a retired nurse, couldn’t find a pulse. Even unconscious, it continued pouring out for a week. Her organ failure and tissue damage tests where normal levels are around 30 were at 13,000.
She had been laying there rotting in the dark and was found purely by chance after she seized and hit a lamp that played music, alerting someone to check on her. If even another hour went by she would have been gone.
At the time, she didn’t seem to have a heartbeat but was clearly alive somehow. They had to insert a catheter into her leg because a regular IV wasn’t fast enough. They had seconds not minutes to save her.
Throughout all of this, they tested her blood sugar repeatedly while
she laid unconscious in the icu. It was always high, yet no one mentioned it. She was discharged with no real answers or plan for her kidneys. Or even told she was in renal failure. She thought she just had a bad seizure from her long term illness and didn’t find out until months later looking at the mychart records. She spent months focusing on healing her leg and still has never regained feeling in all of it due to nerve damage from the catheter they had to put in her bone to save her life.
Later, she was approved for yet another unnecessary surgery because she STILL wasn’t diagnosed with diabetes but in the OR, by the grace of God, they stopped it and said, “We can’t perform this surgery on you. Your blood sugar is through the roof. You have diabetes.”
She went home and had a video visit. When asked her blood sugar, she said 500. The provider immediately told her to go to the ER. There, Dana learned her pancreas had completely failed or never produced insulin. She was peeing out pure sugar so much that it broke the hospital’s measuring scales. Her pancreas produces no insulin it goes in and goes right out. Type 1 Diabetes
Her A1C was through the roof. Her blood sugar was 650, and doctors explained that when someone is that critical, the liver pumps out glucose as a last-ditch survival mechanism. Which is why it got so high and that she was in a chronic state of DKA for years. And 2 diabetic specialists said they had no idea how she was alive. A miracle they called it. But dana didn’t want to be a miracle.. She just wanted to live.
When Dana was in renal failure, she was in a diabetic coma. Doctors told her mom she had some of the worst kidneys they had ever seen and never expected her to recover. She was not diagnosed with diabetes until nearly two YEARS later in fall of 2025, just weeks before her 30th birthday.
They told her multiple times she had been in severe chronic DKA for years, which explained why she was constantly sick. DKA stands for diabetic ketoacidosis, it causes excessive ketones to build up in the system and is a killer in any form of diabetes and is what shut down her GI tract, slowed her stomach to the point she couldn’t go to the bathroom, and made it so she still can’t even drink water. And has barely been able to in 7 years. Occasionally her body lets her
She now has a PICC line connected to a vein near her heart to receive IV fluids. On rare occasions, she can drink small amounts, and those moments are true blessings. And some of the best days of her life. Still, she is too sick even to stand up in a shower and the hot water spikes her sugars even more causing her to faint.
Some people dream of being rich or famous. Dana dreams of drinking an ice cold liter of water, taking a hot shower, or going for a walk in the park on a nice fall day. And especially sitting at the top of the art museum steps alone at night, in the city she grew up and lived in, But doesn’t get to see much as her mother moved her to jersey and her father is 84 and unable to care for her. Her mother is also aging rapidly with ill health and Dana needs better care to keep up the fight.
She also has Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome (EDS), which makes every part of her body fragile like a house built on a faulty structure that eventually collapses.
The reason for this GoFundMe is that when Dana was finally diagnosed with diabetes, she was put on the wrong insulin dose so high that she nearly overdosed and went into psychosis from how critically low her blood sugar went. On December 1st, she bottomed out her blood sugar and nearly died again from a grand mal tonic-clonic seizure. Once again waking up in the intensive care unit
She is now permanently insulin-dependent and cannot miss a single dose or she will die.
Dana is on SSDI and Medicare, which covers almost nothing. The medications, fluids, and medical devices she needs to stay alive are unbelievably expensive. Her disability income because she has no work history as she only worked for short periods because she became bedridden at age 19 is so low it barely covers food she often can’t even eat, let alone medical supplies or safe housing. All the things she needs the most.
These supplies keep her alive, and she cannot afford them.
This GoFundMe is to help Dana afford insulin, medical care, food, and potentially and hopefully safe housing even a tiny studio apartment where she can finally rest and heal. Her current living environment is filled with endless stress that keeps her sick. As even stress can be lethal for a diabetic let alone someone that went undiagnosed that long. She is trapped and terrified.
She sleeps four hours a night at best and often goes five days without sleep. She cannot eat adequately and is waiting months to see GI to be placed on TPN. She doesn’t absorb nutrients, causing hair loss, tooth loss, and extremely slow wound healing. She had a surgery in october that still has a scab on it. You need food, sleep, water, nutrients, peace, to heal and dana has none.
She is in constant pain, has countless symptoms that would take too long to list, and often can’t even make it to the bathroom. She is 30 years old and sometimes needs a walker and even that is hard. She is more disabled than her 84 year old father.
Dana is too sick to maintain any form of consistent income even remote work. She often can’t text or call. Only with very close people because it takes less brain power but even then, she spends many hours alone just staring at the wall.
Yet she is one of the kindest, funniest, most compassionate people I have ever met and one of the least deserving of this suffering. Her life has been marked by abuse, neglect, bullying, illness, and isolation since childhood.
She has fought for every single breath she has taken and she is still fighting to see the light at the end of this dark tunnel.
Insulin has changed her life, but only 30–40% so far. Healing will take years. Her doctor believes she had been diabetic for at least 15 years. Before insulin, Type 1 diabetes was a terminal illness. Dana has been terminally ill since birth and survived what many doctors cannot explain or even make sense of themselves. But dana is very weak and beaten down and often says “Cats have 9 lives. Not 10”
If you knew Dana well, you watched her shrink to 87 pounds. You watched her lose all her hair. You watched her grow weaker. You watched her go from dancing and laughing to losing herself year by year. Later, her body flooded with cortisol from trauma and stress, causing extreme fluid shifts and weight changes of up to 70 pounds in a single day due to kidney failure.
She has missed holidays, birthdays, (she has not celebrated any birthday since she was 19 and she is now 30) and the last 10 years of her grandmother’s life because she was too sick to leave her bed. It breaks her heart because her grandmother was diabetic and one of her final wishes was to know what was wrong with dana. She just wishes she could tell her but she can’t.
Dana hides her pain behind makeup, humor, jokes, and kindness because she wants to make people laugh so they don’t feel the loneliness she has lived with her entire life. Because it’s who she is. Her jokes are cries for connection and help. But she really truly is that funny, that kind, that caring, that compassionate. That human
Her dream is to act, entertain, and make people laugh. She deserves a second chance at life though truly, it would be her first. She lived her entire life in survival mode..It’s time for her to live.
Things are very, very tough right now. But she hasn’t given up, and neither will we.
If you can donate, thank you. If you can’t, please share. Every penny, every share, every act of kindness matters.
We are all rooting for you, Dana. We love you. We want to see you at the top of the art museum steps again. We want to see you shine.. Even though through all of this you manage to light up a city with a single match.
If you want all the proceeds to go directly to dana her cash app is $skitzdana or make a private donation on venmo at skitz-shady but if you’re more comfortable with the go fund that’s fine as well
We set what we consider a small goal for now but at this point every penny counts. Dana has helped so many.. We want to help you now too.
If you can’t donate please share this post with your friends and family. And spread the word.
Thank you for even reading her story. We appreciate even that much
Please watch the video at the top or bottom of Dana at age 18 being honored at her graduation for the amazing person she is and will always be. She was still very sick then but became mostly bedridden only a year and a half to 2 years later after graduating cosmetology school. It started with a few days in bed then weeks, months, years, outings became less and less and then eventually she only left the house twice a year at best to go to the dr. This moment felt like the beginning of the rest of her life for her but then she was hit with what felt like the beggining to the end. Front row seats to her own demise she called it. But we won’t let the grim reaper win.
Organizer
