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Help Lupi recover from getting hit by a car!

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Those of y'all who know me, hey and cowdy! If you don't, I'm Lupi and I do spaceflight photography and outreach here on the Space Coast. I've been running LaunchRats.com since its founder's passing, providing launch viewing advice to tourists and their families, and I often take my bike out to Titusville's parks before a launch to lend people a hand, point out the pads, give rocket photos to kids seeing their first launches, and similar sorts of things. Few things bring me more joy than helping folk experience a rocket launch and have that experience like no other.

Unfortunately, that's going to be difficult for me to do for the next few months. On Saturday, February 11th, I was biking in Melbourne, FL, trying to grow more familiar with parts of the county I seldom visit, when I was struck by a vehicle. They clipped my left handlebar, which knocked me off the bike and threw me onto my left shoulder, breaking it.

Fortunately the fracture isn't severe, and won't require surgery or intensive care, but when my only method of transport to support myself is a bicycle and the doctor says I can't ride it until April, and I'm extremely left-handed to boot, that puts me in a bit of a bind.

Compounding that, I've been unemployed since last June and struggling to keep this roof over my head to begin with while applying to job after job. In that time, a lot of home repair problems have shown up that I can't handle without money or a viable left arm, like my kitchen plumbing getting clogged way deeper than I can route a snake myself.

When you can't run your dishwasher, and you struggle to cook due to your arm being down for the count, problems start to mount, and it's hard to route around those. Disposable tableware only goes so far until you run out of clean pots and pans.

And then, of course, there's the medical bills. I'm lucky that this happened before I was booted from my family's insurance, but there's still gonna be copays and stuff they don't want to cover, between the ambulance ride, ER visit, and the two appointments with the orthopedic surgeon. They had to do a second run of x-rays today because the ER never sent theirs over, for example.

Any money I receive will go towards medical bills, and after that towards things to maintain/improve my situation so I'm able to put the best foot forward once I've healed:
  • In the short term it can grant me a budget for getting food and groceries delivered, given my current difficulty cooking and running errands.
  • I want to get my bike(s) checked over and repaired. They're both long overdue for some general maintenance, even before one got hit by a car, and the other run over by a fuel truck at my previous job.
  • I hope to bring in a plumber and get my kitchen drain snaked, so I don't have to rely on delivery once my arm is healed enough to use for light household stuff, and so I can use my kitchen once this is all over. It is fundamentally impossible to use my bathroom for any dishes, the sink is too small and the shower has Issues from a roof leak.
  • I need to cover general bills while I'm less capable of working, or even getting out of the house in general to do even volunteer outreach stuff.
  • My insurance may lapse before I'm eligible for new glasses in June, in which case I may just try and pay for them out of pocket, if there's any left over.

The long and short of it is, I would like to be able to hit the ground running when this is all over, and be in a slightly better position than I was when I got in the wreck. I've been through a lot these past few years, and I've never really been able to stop, catch my breath, or stem the bleeding.

The house is in far worse shape than it should be, my bikes are run ragged, and I haven't been able to handle the pressure and stress of unemployment (and that brief fling with temporary, nightmarish employment at a shitty gas station) with any amount of grace.

I would use this time to let more than just my shoulder recover, to heal some of the other ailing things in my world.

I'd appreciate it if you could help with that.
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Donations 

  • Anonymous
    • $250
    • 11 mos
  • diogo barros
    • $100
    • 1 yr
  • Anonymous
    • $750
    • 1 yr
  • Anonymous
    • $25
    • 2 yrs
  • Andrew Webber
    • $25
    • 2 yrs
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Organizer

Lupi ᠎
Organizer
Titusville, FL

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