My wife Kirsten and I have been together since 2013, and married since 2016. We've never been more than 24 hours apart from each other. If you ask anybody who knows us, they would tell you how attached we are to each other.

Kirsten, now 43 years old, has had an intestinal and colon disease since she was 24 years old. Ulcerative colitis has plagued her life and has affected her ability to live life to the fullest. She has been managing it with medications and countless doctor visits and colonoscopies every 3 months. She has never, since I've known her, felt good. She has always had some form of discomfort, whether it was mild or severe. We have always, in some way, had to cut our visits with family short and postpone family events or any kind of event were pretty frequent. Her jobs, whichever jobs she had at the time, were always affected negatively. She's had to quit certain jobs or she has been let go because she missed too much time. Even when the time was approved by her work to take those days off, if she came back and started working again, she would be too far behind.

I, for the most part, was the breadwinner. I'm a real estate agent and I have to put in a certain amount of time and be physically cranking out hours of on-the-job work. We have reached a part in our story where I have to now be there for my wife and put in hours to take care of her. So there won't be very much money coming in from my side as well as her side.

An update on some things currently. Normal life things bills Etc have been extremely difficult for us to manage. With Kirsten not coming home anytime soon due to her inability to physically set up walk Etc her muscles have atrophied substantially and it's going to take a lot of intensive physical therapy bring her back to at least a person who can walk on their own. She does not want to be somebody who remains in a wheelchair going forward. Since Tyler has taken a substantial break from his work while still doing things here and there, the bills that pop up are going to sink them.

2 months ago, Kirsten had a perforation in her large intestine bowel. She collapsed in the bathroom at home and an ambulance had to take her to the ICU. She was unconscious for the first 3 weeks of her hospital stay. She was bleeding out internally and waste was spilling out of the perforation into her abdominal cavity. She had to go on dialysis because her kidneys were shutting down, and she needed transfusions. They intubated her with a tracheostomy to breathe and a feeding tube since she wouldn't be eating for a while. With a surgery imminent, the doctor told me that the exploratory surgery was going to be very taxing on her and she may not survive. If she does survive the surgery, the recovery afterward would be even more taxing with a greater risk that she wouldn't survive the next three days after the surgery. But it had to be done. She survived everything, although the surgery was not what was originally planned. They ended up removing her entire large intestine and 6 inches of her small intestine. They fitted her with a colostomy bag. This will be her new life going forward. She will have no more ulcerative colitis disease, but a new challenge that will change her life going forward. Our family life will be changed forever. This GoFundMe is to ask for any help anyone can give to just help us get through the first few months after she gets home. I will be her live-in caregiver and that will leave little time for me to do actual work and she is obviously not working anymore. She's going to have to relearn how to walk and that recovery is just going to be overwhelming so we are asking anyone for help.