Help my wife Karina Wheeler through this

Hi, my name is Craig Wheeler and I am doing this for my wife, Karina Wheeler.

I am here today asking for your assistance to help my wife Karina Wheeler. Karina is getting ready to undergo her 8th surgery in the last two years. The procedure that Is being considered this time is a total gastrectomy. This is major surgery and they say it could take 8 hours or more to perform.

Karina is one of the strongest people/person that I know. It was almost 2 years ago that she started not being able to keep any foods or liquids down at about this time then 2 years ago the pandemic happened., So it was months before we could get in to see the doctor. Her surgeon did exploratory surgery and found that she had adhesions in her intestines. Her doctor fixed that and she was doing pretty good for a couple months. Then I started backup again she was not able to keep foods or liquids down so we spent countless hours and weekends in the emergency room to get her hydrated. She had test after test run. They finally determined she had a hiatal hernia. While repairing it, the tissue was attached to the pleura in the lungs and caused a rupture in the pleura causing the air in her lungs to fill her body cavity. Afterwards she was doing better until she started to eat solid foods again and it started up again. They did procedures to try and stretch the esophagus with a balloon, then tried botox injections into the esophagus in an effort to heal her. Then they did a myotomy, which is a surgical procedure to cut the muscles around the esophagus. All of these procedures had the same result…a few weeks of relief and then back to not being able to keep very much down. Her doctors told her that they were “lost”. In August last year, we talked to her surgeon, and asked him if a gastric feeding tube was an option that they had previously mentioned so that her body could get nourishment while the rest of her upper digestive tract had an opportunity to heal. He thought that this was a good idea and this began the start of her condition worsening.

On September 1st, she had the gastric feeding tube put in surgically. They had to relocate her remnant stomach and attach it to the abdominal wall. A couple of days later, while she was in the hospital, they began using the feeding tube via a pump to continuously give her fluids. They released her from the hospital. On September 4th, she was in excruciating pain and had to go back to the ER. They discovered that the remnant stomach had a 5mm hole in it and that nourishment they had been giving her had leaked into the abdominal cavity and had given her Sepsis, so emergency surgery again to repair the whole and clean out the infection.

This hadn’t worked and as a result of the infection she was hesitant to use the feeding tube and her condition got worse.

Karina is severely dehydrated and they say malnourished. The only time she was able to get fluids was when we went to the ER because she was so dehydrated. And then the cycle repeated. We tried to get her doctor to prescribe fluids, but couldn’t get an infusion center to accommodate the request. We found a place that wasn’t covered by insurance that gave her fluids and some vitamins via IV. During this time Karina reached out to doctors in Brazil asking then to review her case and medical records from the past two years.

The doctor in Brazil suggested that she come there and they would treat her. So we decided to send her to Brazil to see if they could do something for her and here we are getting ready for that surgery within the next week. We are looking at around 300,000 Reals (or roughly $60,000 U S dollars( for this surgery and hospitalization and recovery. The procedure involves removing the stomach pouch, part of the esophagus and lymph nodes in that area, with possible reductions in other organs in that area. So, if this does solve her problems, she has a long recovery period afterwards so that she is able to have a quality of life.

We appreciate any help that you are able to give her. If you are not to help financially, then we ask for your prayers to guide the hands of the doctors and heal her.

I know this reads like a novel but it is important that you understand everything she has happened to her these last two years. I’m not sure that if this had happened to me, that I would have had the strength and fortitude to get to this point.

God Bless.

Craig Wheeler