Hi, my name is Nicole and I’m fundraising for my Dad, Phil.

Our Dad IS A SURVIVOR. Despite never seeming to grasp a calm year for many years, he radiates positivity, is fully invested in each of his kids' and his granddaughter’s lives, and is always available for a talk. Phil is the old guy at the YMCA that everyone stops and talks to. It takes him forever (in a good way) to get in and out of a store or restaurant because he's a sociable person and likes hearing how others are doing and what his friends are up to. He's old school. He's a Chicagoan at heart and wishes he was able to come back to visit.

In 2006, he and my Mom retired from the full-time work lifestyle of Chicagoland and moved to Florida. Although this had been a dream of theirs for years once us kids were out of the house, their vision of life near a beach has never gotten off the ground.

Immediately after the move, Phil was diagnosed with prostate cancer, which took years to battle. We are so thankful each day Dad is with us, and his doctor's monitoring shows a good prognosis for the future.

However, because of the prostate cancer surgeries, he has incurred hernias in his abdomen. And as a byproduct of failed attempts to immediately solve the hernias with a mesh screen, he sustained a large amount of scar tissue forcing additional medical procedures to correct this medical complication.

While recovering, my Dad was the passenger victim in a horrendous fiery car crash. He was hospitalized for a lengthy period for burns across his hands, face, and arm; and permanently damaged vertebrae in his back, along with suffering a major concussion. Upon release, he was cared for by a team of nurses within his home. Dad lost a lot of himself because of injuries sustained from this crash.

As a heavy equipment tow truck operator whose career included performing rescue missions of passenger buses and trains, my Dad used his body as a tool each and every day, climbing up and down the truck to move levers and operate equipment to get the job done. This took a major toll on his body. My father finally elected to do something medically for himself and had his knees replaced. We were joyous with this decision as his mobility had greatly decreased over the ten years of heart-wrenching disease and accident recovery.

As his rehabilitation from the second knee replacement finished, we noticed a tremor in his hand. A visit to his back doctor who he saw after the car accident dispelled any problems with imaging. But the tremor continued to get worse. Many medical tests to deduce the symptom and the realization that other symptoms were also occurring yielded a visit to a neurologist who diagnosed my father with Parkinson's Disease in 2018.

Our family was devastated. How much more could our Dad take? As it turns out, our father's strength is what keeps us going each day to this day and leads us to tomorrow.

In early summer 2022, our Dad was rushed by ambulance to the ER with a severely high fever from COVID-19. As it turns out, Parkinson’s patients are affected differently by the virus. He had to stay hospitalized for a span of days and could sparingly take fever reducers due to medication complications related to the neurological disorder.

Along the way, it was discovered that Dad had melanoma and underwent plastic surgeries to remove and repair the areas of this additional cancer diagnosis. 

In late summer 2022, it was unbelievable news... our Dad was the victim of another car crash by an underinsured motorist leaving our family to pay much of the medical bills from injuries that reinjured his back-related injuries.

Since the Parkinson’s Disease diagnosis, he has had several bad falls yielding to emergency room visits and admissions into the hospital for internal injuries. These stays have lasted from days to a month. Most recently in late January 2023, he lost his balance and dislocated his shoulder, and was transported to the ER via ambulance. We are working through getting him physical therapy while the shoulder heals because with Parkinson's Disease, he needs to continue his mobilization even while in a sling.

Phil is a good man who took care of his family and now needs our help to take care of him. And that includes the horrible financial burden put upon his household due to all of the medical bills from what has occurred from all of the above disease and accidents he has survived. We all can imagine what one ER's visit may cost, or one procedure in the hospital, even with insurance. But stack these up with the amount of negative medical occurrences my father has had since 2006 and our family is fully stretched in what we can do financially.

We sincerely appreciate you learning of our Dad's survivor's story. He truly is one of the nicest people on the planet and we want to share his positivity, despite going through so much, with you in this message.

Thank you for your support and generosity.

Nicole/Phil's eldest child