Help my mum have this holiday. She deserves it!

My Mum Jill is tied down in Melbourne unless she can get kidney dialysis. 

Will you give so she can get kidney dialysis while on holiday?

My mum’s kidney function was destroyed after months of undergoing treatment for necrotising fasciitis and then, within weeks of getting home from 8 months in hospital, she suffered from COVID. 

She only survives by having kidney dialysis three times a week for 5 hours each time. She can’t leave Melbourne unless she can get dialysis.

More than anything, she longs for a holiday.

I planned to take her to the Gold Coast at Easter. She had booked the Big Red Kidney Bus (a mobile dialysis unit) but had her application rejected.

What’s worse, we’d already booked accommodation and flights!

We have rung every hospital on the Gold Coast to find out if their dialysis units could give her the four sessions she needs. But apparently there is only one ‘holiday chair’ available for dialysis patients on the whole of the Gold Coast.

So the only option is private health services, but they cost around $800 per session. That’s means around $3000 for four sessions.

I’ve paid for flights. And I’ve paid for accommodation (a nice, wheelchair accessible cabin in a caravan park) but that extra $3000 is too much.

Will you give to help give my Mum have this holiday?

She’s had a rough trot. Eight years ago she cut her leg in the Cairns River – just a little cut – and ended up in hospital for six months with sepsis and necrotising fasciitis. She spent the next month in a coma while having multiple rounds in the hyperbaric chamber.

She couldn’t talk or move after waking from a coma and had to re-learn how to walk, talk and everything in between.

After 8 long months in hospital, she had undergone multiple surgeries trying to save what was left of her leg using Skin grafting treatment.

Unfortunately there was just not enough skin, nerve or tissue for this to work and so, we had to make the difficult decision to have her leg amputated.

Then when COVID hit, she spent 10 weeks in hospital with it and lost most of her remaining kidney function.

So now she’s tied down in Melbourne, in a wheelchair, and longing for a change of scene.

And being unable to travel without paying a fortune in private health care makes her feel like a second-class citizen.

If we can’t get help with this kidney dialysis, she’ll have to miss out. She can’t go without it – it keeps her alive.

If you can help out, in any way, big or small, my brother Archie and I would be really grateful. Our Mum means the world to us and we really want to do this for her. Please give if you can so our long-suffering Mum can have a holiday. 

Your donation will help pay for her kidney dialysis while she’s there. 

I appreciate each one of you taking the time to read our story.

And Thank you all so much for any help you can give. 

Harriet & Archie