As you may know, over the course of the last 15 months I needed to have my right ankle operated on twice. When I first fractured my ankle in 2018 as a restaurant worker I was on my feet constantly and didn’t have adequate health insurance, so without proper care the ankle grew more vulnerable to injury. Eventually, within the course of a year, I sprained my ankle three times (once playing in the park with my niece, once in a bike crash, and the third time when I was hit by a car riding my bike home from work). As a result, in June of 2020, I needed to have two tendons in my right ankle replaced.

Then, ten months into the recovery process, the hardware in my ankle

(used to attach the new tendons in place) started to cause an extreme amount of nerve pain. My doctors decided that the two screws mounting the tendons to my joints were safe too, and needed to be, removed. Even though this type of second surgery shouldn’t be necessary, I was left with a second set of bills for the procedure only partially covered by my new job’s insurance.

This has all left me in a place with medical bills that are overwhelming at this point.