Help David Brown Find Stability and Healing

Battling to Rest…to battle…to heal.

For a bit of introduction, my husband and I are both Christian ministers. And for the last about 7 years, my husband has been one of the most-friendly-green-shirted guys you see working in our local Dick’s Sporting Goods store. God has blessed us with two children and three grandchildren and a beautiful granddaughter-in-law. In 2012, after a vicious battle with brain cancer, our daughter moved to her heavenly home. The rest of us all still live and love Texas.

As you know, tragedies and maladies know no strangers, and are always unplanned visitors on this journey called life. We know God has a plan, and that sometimes, hopefully more times than not, He uses these unplanned, and hardly ever imagined things to shake us to the core, bring us to the end of ourselves, and cause us to realize we need help!

Our son David was born with what doctors called ‘abnormal electrode activity of the brain’. As a child, this diagnosis presented some learning disabilities, and seizures from 3 years old on. Seizures every day. Sometimes as many as 30 a day. Even with years of multiple medication trials, he suffered with seizures daily for 12 years. In his teen years, the medical team decided that perhaps a series of 4 surgeries, would help to end the seizures. In the last two surgeries they severed the corpus callosum, separating the 2 hemispheres of the brain, and then removed the left frontal lobe, of his brain. Just to write these facts, makes my heart cry out, “What were we thinking?” I guess we were young and trusting…hoping.

Even now, at 51 years old, daily seizures (or nightly) are still part of David’s life. Some days I feel like I’m the one operating on half my brain with no sleep, but for David this is not a feeling, it is the reality. Separating the brain, and removing the lobe, left him with cognitive handicaps we could not have imagined. There is, and has been, a raging battle going on inside his head for the last 40 plus years. He looks like any adult, he wants to work, but he has no way to figure out how to live life. Insurance is impossible and community resources are constantly in my search bar. The last eight years, he has had no meds, no treatments, and no doctor. Many days I have wondered if he will make it to sundown. Things we take for granted...speech, conversation, reasoning, making decisions, balance, working, emotions, general health and more are like a vapors. He may grasp them temporarily. He may remember…he may not. The list seems to be growing with the normal health complications of aging.

The last 18 months, things have gone from bad to seemingly impossible. David has also been bound in a desperate situation of homelessness. Homelessness is more than living without four walls and a roof. It is a cycle. We have learned that true homelessness is a tangled web. A tangled web where you are tied up striving to be warm, or keep cool, where you fight depression, disease, disgrace, loneliness, hunger, filth, and daily obstacles…walls so solid and limiting, yet seemingly invisible to those around you.

We need to find financial help for David, now. His mind is raging. It is in an everyday battle. In order for him to even begin to get the mental and medical assistance, treatment, and doctors he needs, he must get off the streets. He must get settled. He must find quiet to organize a plan, a doctor, therapy, treatments, and healing.

If you can help in any way, would you please prayerfully consider donating to our fundraiser? There is no gift too small. All financial gifts will be used entirely to secure housing, medical treatments, doctors and therapy for David. We so appreciate whatever you can do. Perhaps you could consider passing this letter on to your family and friends?

Thank you from our hearts and home, and may God abundantly bless you and yours.

Sincerely, Paul and Sue Brown