Help Rachel Gibbs on Her Kidney Transplant Journey

I am Jeff Gibbs, and I'm helping raise money for my daughter, Rachel Gibbs as she continues her arduous journey through End Stage Renal Disease and on towards being placed on the Kidney Transplant List.

In June of this year, she was diagnosed with Goodpasture's Syndrome, an extremely rare autoimmune disease that can attack your lungs and/or kidneys. As of now, her kidneys have completely and permanently shut down within a 2 month time period and without daily dialysis she would likely die within just 1-2 weeks. She also had seizures due to this dialysis and fractured her jaw in the process as well, but those two things are mostly resolved now. Thank God for modern medical science!

Rachel has spent her entire life being a glowing light of joy, laughter, kindness, hard work, and perseverance for her friends and family, and she most certainly did not deserve the hand that life has dealt her over the last few months.

She's gone from working at University Health Truman Medical Center as a medical laboratory scientist to being a patient just upstairs from the lab where she worked. She's gone from graduating with top honors from the University of Kansas and walking miles each day while she played Mellophone in the Football Marching Band and Men's and Women's Basketball Pep Band, to hardly being able to walk up the stairs in her own house.

We are very thankful that she had terrific health insurance from her place of employment, but despite that, she (and her family) are struggling to figure out how all the expenses are going to be met.

As you can imagine, Rachel has incurred several major medical expenses and will continue to rack up those expenses as her journey towards her kidney transplant progresses. What compounds the problem is her FMLA / Short-Term Disability only pays 60% of what her income used to be. She can hardly cover her mortgage payment at this time, let alone household expenses, food, and other bills. She's met her out of pocket maximum for 2024, but will start over in 2025. Her medical bills alone will top $11,000. Throw in countless prescriptions and other medical needs and she's looking at an expected $20,000 deficit, but it will likely be more. And to add insult to injury, since her hospitalization, she's had to replace the air conditioning/furnace system in her house, buy new tires for her car, and now has to purchase an expensive adjustable bed so she can take her peritoneal dialysis treatments more effectively.

It's not hard to see how this will quickly overstress her financial situation, and obviosuly stress her mentally and physically while she waits for a transplant situation to materialize. Her family is obviously helping out in all the ways we can, but her mother is still recovering from the medical bills associated with cancer treatment and I'm dealing with some minor, but not inexpensive health issues of my own. Otherwise, we would never send up the flare for help. But here we are, humbly asking for whatever small amount of help you can provide for her. Words can't express how much her and her entire family appreciates even a $1 donation. Every little bit counts, so thank you for taking the time to read this!!