Help Josh and Michelle stay together

Michelle and I first met as Facebook friends a few years ago. In 2018, we began chatting directly and, after a while, realized we had developed romantic feelings. That summer, she came to visit me at my home in Las Vegas from London, where she was born and raised, and we fell in love.

Since then, we have fought steep odds and bad luck to be together. During her visit to spend Christmas of 2018 with my family and I in Vegas, Michelle had a bad medication interaction and instead of sitting by the fire at my parents' house, we spent Christmas in a hospital room, her in a coma on a ventilator and me next to her, playing her favorite music and brewing cups of strong English tea with a portable kettle and waving them under her nose in hopes of bringing her out of it. (It seems to have worked; she woke up after a few weeks with no apparent permanent injury.)

Her visits to me in America continued, and then just before Christmas of 2019, I got a hysterical call from the Montreal airport: US Customs had denied her entry into the country, claiming her extended stays in America were "suspicious". I booked her a hotel room and began raising hell, calling my Congressperson and Senator and ultimately flying to Montreal to be with her. We dealt with mysterious power outages at the US consulate there and spent Christmas in a hotel room far from either of our homes, which was a step up from the hospital room but still not ideal.

And then 2020 happened.

In March, just as the pandemic was beginning to rage in America, I suffered two heart attacks in a week and underwent emergency triple bypass open heart surgery. Michelle booked a ticket to Vegas immediately, to be with me during the surgery and to help nurse me back to health afterwards, if I survived it.

Her flight was booked two hours after Trump banned all flights into the United States.

The surgery was successful, though it left me severely weakened and in agonizing pain and suffering from a kind of mental fog that made it difficult to concentrate or think clearly. I was discharged early due to fears about catching Covid-19 if I remained in the hospital, and spent the next three months relying on friends to bring me food and groceries as I lay in bed, unable to do much at first other than get up to use the restroom, but eventually to walk around with a walker and then a cane and on my own.

And the entire time, Michelle was with me - not in person, but in spirit and on the other end of the chat window and the video call. And we realized that we could not and did not want to live without each other.

When my stimulus check came, I bought a ticket to London. Even that became a nightmare, as my flights were first delayed then rescheduled and finally canceled because of the pandemic.

But finally, on the 5th of July, I was here, with my baby, in the wilds of the northern London suburbs. We were together.

But we need your help to stay together.

My visa runs out January 5th. In order to stay, the immigration lawyer I've spoken to advises I apply for a fiance visa, which normally cannot be done while in the UK, but those restrictions are relaxed due to the virus. Once that is approved, we can get married and I can go through the next steps to become a resident and eventually a citizen of the UK.

But the filing and legal fees for this are pretty steep. Michelle has fibromyalgia and is on disability; I have continued to work part-time as a coder while recovering, but it's been a constant struggle to be productive while fighting the mental fog I mentioned (which makes programming an uphill battle), as well as the physical aftereffects of the open heart surgery. I was left with nerve damage in my chest and leg and suffer from almost constant agonizing upper body, shoulder and back pain in my bones, muscles and nerves. I am not eligible for more than temporary access to medical care from a GP under the NHS, but I have gotten prescriptions for painkillers and anti-inflammatories that help. But I'm still not yet in any condition to go hunting down freelance work or contracts with US companies. I rarely sleep more than a few hours a night because I'm kept awake late and woken up early by pain. So my income is extremely limited, as is Michelle's disability pay. Neither of us have been able to put away any savings over the past few years.

But we take care of each other, Michelle and I. Neither of us function well anymore without each other; together, we can just about make it through until I recover enough to return to full time contract work.

So we need help with the cost of keeping me here, which consists of the following:

- A fiance visa fee which our lawyer says could be either £1552.20 or £1052.20, because it depends on whether they waive part of it due to an emergency Covid concession; there's no clear precedent for this yet);
- An "Immigration Health Surcharge" of £1560, which will apparently be refunded at some point (and almost certainly used to help pay for the marriage fees and the fees for whatever we have to file once we're married);