Hi, my name is Lori Shepherd. I am the niece of Sandra Shepherd. This go fund me is for my aunt who recently past away. Sandra was born with an intellectual disability due to complications during birth. She had special needs and could be very challenging some days. Even so, I did do my best to take care of her for the last 16 years. She has suffered with renal disease for many years and waited until she was in end stage renal failure to begin dialysis. This was in July of this year. She was in the hospital for a few days and then went to a nursing rehabilitation home to get her body stronger and to work on walking again. This was new for her and scary too. She had never been away from the home without a family member with her. We would visit her every week. During her stay at the home, she was having trouble breathing. We assumed it was covid. She was coughing and doing breathing treatments, nothing was working. She is rushed to er and ends up in ICU. She had a lump that you could feel on the side of her neck. They believed it was a thyroid mass. Porterville hospital was not equipped to handle surgeries for that, so she was air lifted to UCLA, Santa Monica Medical Center. They had her sedated on a ventilator. She would spend the next 30 days doing various tests to figure out what was going on. She was unable to talk and would almost suffocate or drown on saliva. When she was awake she would begin choking and a nurse would have to sucction her many times. It was difficult to watch. The thyroid Mass was growing at a fast rate and had took over her trachea and down her esophagus and into her chest cavity basically it was corroding her entire throat area it turned out that she had a rare and a plastic thyroid cancer that was growing very fast and there was nothing they could do to remove it or to help her. After everything she's gone through and to finally have her doing dialysis in which case she was doing good on she looked healthy sand she was back to her old self . Then she gets hit with a thyroid cancer and died a few days later after we took her off the ventilator. We were not expecting the cost for a funeral and medical bills to be so overwhelming. I don't like to ask for help but in this case I do need a little help to bury my aunt and then let her be at peace. If you could help out in any way whether it's a dollar or $5 any amount would help. The last 4 months has been a major roller coaster ride of going back and forth to UCLA only to lose my aunt. All she wanted to do was to go home and she will never be coming home. Again. I am at a loss I still can't believe she's not coming back. Some of her funeral is paid for but I was not expecting some expenses like over $1,200 just to dig up a plot and transportation fees. I really need your help if you can give it. I really would appreciate it. Thank you for the prayers too.