Medical bills (and one real-life problem) have piled up to the point that I am asking for some financial assistance to get us through Armand’s medical needs.

 

Quick update for those who may be seeing this for the first time: My 14-year-old son, Armand, was diagnosed with stage-4 neuroblastoma (cancer of the nervous system) when he was 2, and underwent two years of intensive treatment where he survived against all odds. Although the cancer itself was gone, the impact on his body remains. We always knew for sure there would be two late-breaking cancer problems to deal with. The first of them, Armand’s foot surgery, was handled in 2015 and turned out perfectly well.

 

The second, his teeth, started hitting last year, and we’re still working on paying for it. Cancer does weird things to your teeth. WEIRD things. And the chemo he was on was so experimental that they’re still studying him to determine what’s going to happen to the kids who received it after him. Long story short, he requires a great deal of dental work in the near future and at least one major jaw surgery over the next year, and it’s going to cost a lot out of pocket.

 

Because of the unique nature of his problems, he requires a lot of specialist care, and it took a while to even find specialists who were qualified to handle problems this weird. This doesn’t come cheap, and most of it is a pay-in-advance kind of thing. This is making the fiscal situation as tight as it’s ever been since the first year of the cancer era. Worse, actually; we could work with the hospital and still get the work done while working it out. That’s not the case here.

 

In the middle of all this, we’ve got Autumn-Rose’s recent eye surgery and upgrades to her glasses, which aren’t as major as his problems but still drain the bank account.

 

(In case anyone’s wondering about social service or government help, I make too much for that, and this is not the kind of thing that generally gets covered anyway.)

 

Then we had a car repair that completely broke the bank. We were able to make payments through a repair finance company, but the interest rates are high enough that we are paying far more in interest than principal right now. That one’s on me, but I also didn’t feel like there was much of a choice, given how broken my car was. Thing is, the payments are basically an interest black hole wiping out a good chunk of my paycheck and giving me no leeway to cover things like this.

 

So that’s why I’m asking for help now – not for myself, but for them. That said, I am not entirely asking for charity here. Paying people back is possible – I’d rather pay people back directly than continue to send money down the interest drain.

 

And as always, I am completely willing to offer housecleaning or any other kind of household job in exchange. Help my family out and I’ll happily work on your house. Help us out enough and you can have a top-to-bottom deep cleaning!

 

I know the fundraising goal here is an ambitious one, but that number is to basically wipe out all the costs facing us at the moment. Even if we fall short, everything I can pay towards these bills helps a lot.

 

And Armand is an artist, after all. We can throw in a drawing or a clay creation for particularly big donations :). (Maybe he'll make the big time one day and these sketches will be valuable!)

 

Thank you all from the bottom of our hearts.