Hello all,

For those of you who don't know me, I'm Jessie. I have spent my adult life serving others and helping anyone in need, including our family Thanksgiving feeding and clothing the homeless. I am a full-time foster parent, so I have no FMLA or disability to fall back on when emergencies happen.

This entire year has been a cluster. On top of caring for the hardest of the hard in foster care (therapeutic), I've been close to death twice.

The first was at the beginning of the year when I went into sepsis and ended up a month later in and out of the hospital. I had a very rare case of cat scratch fever that almost took my liver and spleen. That took me away from my children from Jan to March.

This caused a ripple effect of doctor appointments, syncope episodes multiple times daily with zero diagnosis. Doctor after doctor and no answer.

Come the week of Halloween, I was excited to have a trial nerve stimulator implanted with the intention to have a full one placed after. I knew something was wrong the day of placement and the rep refused to tell the doctor I was in pain. Come Halloween, I go in and we come up with a hopeful solution to "save" the trial. If a rep ever uses those words, take it out immediately!!!! I thought he was being sincere, but nope...just another paycheck.

My pain management doctor did his best, but the pain came back tenfold and ended me in the hospital. The hospital refused to pull the stimulator, so they gave my husband all the equipment and he used the doctor's instructions to pull it. Well...my body had already rejected the hardware and I had staph in my spinal cord. It affected my right arm, so into emergency surgery we go. They had to remove C7 and T1 just to get to the infection. I'm healing, but we have sporadic funds to take care of our children.

The holiday season is coming and I want to make sure to get through while I heal. Anything helps, especially prayers!!!! Those are the best.

If you've made it this far and feel the desire to help our family, I would appreciate it so much!!!

Much love,

Jessie