Isabella Morelli's US Medical Bills, Surgery

Ayuda para Isabella Morelli con sus gastos médicos en Estados Unidos debido a su cirugía de cerebro.

TL;DR: Isabella, a screenwriter and filmmaker from Colombia, had to get emergency brain surgery in the US, where her traveler's insurance doesn't cover anything shunt-related as they consider it a pre-existing condition. She's in the process of getting her green card and thus can't leave the country but couldn't hold off on the surgery, so now she has a hefty medical bill, and with no authorization to work, no way to begin to pay for it.

Isabella moved to the US in 2013 to pursue a degree in Film & Television. After four years of school and a year of student visa work authorization, she had to return to Colombia in 2018 while she figured out her options to a path to legally work in the US, where all her training, network, and contacts in the industry are.

Isabella has hereditary hydrocephalus and has had a VP shunt to drain spinal fluid since she was a month old. For 20+ years, it’s worked perfectly. But in late November, as she was about to begin the process of her visa, she started to show symptoms of infection in the shunt, for the first time in her life. She had to fly to Colombia immediately, where her health insurance and her neurosurgeon are. The surgery went well, and she returned to the US to continue her visa process, that due to administrative schedules and lawyer timelines, had to be delayed until January.

There were no signs of the surgery not having been a success until early February, when she was admitted to a Brooklyn hospital due to severe abdominal pain where her shunt catheter was placed, and occasional headaches. The doctors could not link the abdominal pain to the shunt, so she was discharged. She was referred to a neurosurgeon at Lennox Hill Hospital to get a second opinion, and within two days of meeting with him, she started to show infection symptoms and had to be admitted to the hospital.

Isabella was in the hospital for close to two weeks due to the infection of the VP shunt. Because of the infection, she had to have surgery to remove the entire shunt from her brain and abdomen. She had to remain in the ICU for a week with an external shunt and antibiotics while the infection left her system. After that, the doctors performed an Endoscopic Third Ventriculostomy, a second brain surgery that would eliminate the need for another shunt. After about a week of monitoring the aftermath of the ETV (and lots of expensive CAT scans), the surgery was deemed a success and she was discharged from the hospital.

Since she is in a transitional period of getting a visa – which she’s been working hard towards for the past two years since graduating from college in the U.S. with a degree in filmmaking – she only has a traveler’s insurance plan that classifies this situation as a pre-existing condition and won’t cover a cent of her stay at the hospital, where the down-payment alone for hospitalization was $10,000. That means she’s paying the entire cost for this 10+ day hospital stay, multiple surgeries, the ICU, CAT scans, medication, etc. out of pocket. Combined with shouldering visa application costs and living expenses while not being able to legally work, she’s facing much more than she can handle. If you can, please chip in to help her pay her hospital bills to get her through this and on her feet!