Hello! My name is Tom, I’m a father of two beautiful girls, a husband and a hard worker and truck driver. Under normal circumstances I wouldn’t even consider attempting something like a GoFundMe but for the sake of my family I’m swallowing my pride and I’m giving it a shot.

On April 1st, 2024 I clocked in an hours or so after midnight to begin the shift that would take me home. After months of rescuing people from blizzards earlier in the year, my refrigerator on my truck not working and spoiling all my food and falling behind on sleep, there wasn’t anything in the world I wanted more than to go home and rest. Well that and lots of caffeine energy drinks, because after so many rough months I couldn’t keep my eyes open without them.

Well unfortunately, all of this hard work and bad sleep caught up with me. The lack of sleep and too much caffeine finally made my body freak out. Something happened to where blood was not getting circulated to my body properly. I could tell something was wrong and tried to stop the truck but I lost consciousness. When I came to I was uninjured but the truck was in the median ditch. No one else was involved the truck wasn’t totalled.

What happened next might’ve made things worse. Because when emergency responders came the police never gave me a breathalyser and the EMTs took me away before they could even ask me questions.

The ER doctor confirmed I didn’t have a stroke and since I don’t have any underlying heart conditions he said it sounded like I simply almost worked myself to death.

Unfortunately, the state of Illinois didn’t see it that way. They took both my CDL and my normal driving privileges. Which means I couldn’t work or even drive to another job in the meantime. They told me I had to see a cardiologist get scans done, I had to wear heart monitors, I was ordered to see a neurologist to have a whole bunch of tests done to confirm I don’t have a neurological condition.

After months of testing and waiting for appointments and twiddling my thumbs the final verdict was that I was in perfect health and fit to drive. This costed me tens of thousands of dollars. At this point I was digging into my savings for this and I was wholly responsible for making payments of my medical insurance too. We were running out of money fast.

This was dire because I also had no way of legally commuting to a job. And even when my states government accepted that I was clear to drive, they still made me go back to truck driving school to get my CDL back.

So begrudgingly I did. And then I made a decision to keep my family from going bankrupt. We sold our house in Illinois which staved off a lot of the debt and moved to Washington to stay in my parents house. I now have a truck driving job up here that gets me home every day and I have real weekends off. But we still have a lot of debt and any emergency or surprise expense could cripple us even now. We have no emergency fund. So as ashamed as I am, I am asking the community to help with the debt I accrued from all the medical testing and medical insurance payments so that I can give my family financial stability and start setting aside money for an emergency fund. We still owe a borrowed amount of approximately $17,000 and until it's settled we can't find our own home or put together an emergency fund.