Friends, kind strangers, and beloved community near and far,

Murphy here :)

This isn’t easy for me to do. In fact, it is incredibly hard and I have been anxiously avoiding it for a couple months now, even though I knew it was necessary and inevitable. But, still, it is vulnerable and painful. And, despite the very real apprehension and aversion, I trust you all with that vulnerability because in my varying years with all of you, and in many new people I meet, I have been given love, camaraderie, fellowship, and companionship and that has meant the world to me. Thank you.

Now to the hard part - I need help.

Last October I became gravely and, for a time, mysteriously ill. I was subsequently physically and energetically incapacitated and unable to support myself financially and functionally day to day, for several months. I am still healing and recovering my physical strength and regaining connection with my body. It has been a long and hard 7 months.

Because of all of this I have fallen desperately behind on monthly housing costs and bills and am at serious risk of losing my humble, but safe and secure home of 10 years.

In addition to the stress of a major illness and subsequent financial instability, I am also in a place of deep and complex grief as my mother passed away in February, the day I was discharged from the hospital the second time, following a major surgery in which I needed to have my sigmoid colon removed as well as adjacent internal reproductive organ structures and nearby damaged tissue. I am absolutely heartbroken over her passing.

She was across the country at the time and her death was untimely, painful and the result of a terrible degenerative terminal disease. We had a complicated, at times very difficult, but deeply connected relationship. She was never able to fully accept and embrace the fact that I am transgender and that was hard, but I loved her deeply and her death is weighing very heavily on me these days. It has all just been so much to be confronted by and move through all at once. It has been a really, really challenging and painful time period.

I sat down, after weeks of considering the need to take steps towards asking for help and support, to write all of this up and found myself trying to explain the entire onset and trajectory of this illness and my experience over the last several months, and it was just so much. Too much, perhaps, for me to relive emotionally in every detail and too many words for practical purposes here, for y’all to read, in this gofundme appeal for support. But, I do want to try to do my best to summarize what has been going on with me and my body over the past 7 months without getting too much in the weeds or overwhelmed. The full run down is a few paragraphs down under “Illness”.

Need -

This ask is definitely not aimed at other folks and friends out here who are struggling to just get by, I know I am not the only one going through hard times and even before this I've never really had enough money to ever feel like I was doing great, or even really "ok", in this world. So, please don't feel any kind of way about not having extra money to donate. And, if folks are up for sharing on social media and otherwise that is huge help in itself.

So, after some months of being behind on my mortgage, I received a letter of intent to foreclose from the bank. I was able to temporarily keep the bank at bay, but only by taking money from a home equity line of credit, which I have no way currently to pay off and which I was forced to use to pay for utility bills and other living expenses during this time period. Very much a robbing Peter to pay Paul scenario. And that line of credit is at its limit so it won’t be long before the bank will be on me again. I am ready to get back on my feet and establish some stability in my life again so that I can continue to cover my housing costs and bills well into the future and I am confident that I will be able to get back to that place in due time. But, right now, I’ve been derailed into a pretty deep hole from this difficult time in my life and health and am in need of some immediate support. @murphosaur on venmo and cashapp

The overall goal amount accounts for 8 months of mortgage payments @$845 per month, 8 months of utility bills and $790 for a vehicle repair I needed to have done last week so that I had reliable transportation again after my car being inoperable since late December, all of which I have had to cover with credit against the bit of equity in my home. The initial goal is going to be set at $5,500 but the actual need is $10,550.

I know this is a massive amount, but even if this campaign doesn’t even come anywhere close to this goal any little bit will mean so much and help buy me more time to get back on my feet. Thank you all so much for taking the time to read this and perhaps for sharing it within your networks and social media if you decide to do so. @murphosaur on venmo and cashapp

My Home -

As a middle-aged, low income transgender person from a working class background with a history of housing instability, my weird little 100-year old, 435 Sq foot cottage in the city means so much to me. This house has been a place of personal sanctuary and a cozy, stable home for myself and my 3 sweet orange cat companions. My little couch lions. They also mean the world to me.

While it hasn’t always been a smooth ride for me living in Minneapolis, I've been through some very hard and trying times here, I moved here 10 years ago to access established trans health care systems and begin medically transitioning as I knew Minnesota was far ahead of most of the country when it came to trans rights and trans healthcare at a systemic level. In that regard, it has been an incredible place to live as a transgender person. Which is another reason why it feels so important to me that I am able to stay in my house. Considering the current political climate and societal and legislative attacks on trans rights and public lives, it feels even more important to me that I am able to stay in my home, in Minnesota where we at least have some protections at the state level for the foreseeable future.

Illness-

In the second week of October I came down with what started out as typical cold/flu-like symptoms - fever, chills, aches, headaches, fatigue, swollen lymph nodes and the like. Covid tests were negative. Myself and my provider assumed I had picked up a run of the mill cold/flu virus during a large social gathering/camping trip with friends the week prior. But, as the weeks went on I didn’t get better. I began to get much worse. The fever persisted, the chills, aches, and fatigue worsened, and the systemic inflammation triggered my severe autoimmune induced asthma on top of everything else.

I was in really rough shape, struggling to breath despite being on multiple inhalers, steroids and oral asthma meds, while continuing to carry a daily fever of 101-103 along with the other symptoms. My health deteriorated rapidly. I lost over 12% of my body weight in a matter of a few weeks. I was fatigued and physically weak in a way that I had never experienced before, nor could have ever imagined at 42 years old, and I began suddenly and without much warning vomiting out of nowhere throughout the days.

Not knowing why I was so sick and rapidly declining, I was sent in for extensive bloodwork and a wide range of pathology screenings. Everything came back negative, except my metabolic and hematology panels were alarmingly abnormal. My white blood cell counts were through the roof and the ratios were off and my liver enzyme levels indicated acute liver failure. I was sent for further blood work and given a course of broad spectrum antibiotics.

More tests came back suggesting I was experiencing a latent epstein barr virus flare up and for a time, my provider thought that might be why I was so sick. So the plan was to rest and continue using the inhalers. But, over the next couple of weeks I continued to decline and then developed some very unusual and concerning gastro-intestinal symptoms. At this point I was sent to an acute diagnostic facility adjacent to a local hospital where they drew more blood for more tests and did a CT scan of my abdomen. Shortly after my CT scan the doctor returned to my exam room and told me in an urgent manner that I was not going home, to call whoever I needed to, that I was being transferred immediately to the surgical floor of the hospital and that a nurse was on her way to start me on IV antibiotics. That was December 5th.

On the CT scan they discovered multiple fistula tracts coming off of my sigmoid colon and leading to a large, and it turns out potentially life threatening, internal abscess that also had affected nearby reproductive organ structures. I was in the hospital on IV antibiotics for 5 days and they placed a CT guided drain in my abdomen to drain the infection from the abscess. In the end, I had the drain in place for 2 months to try to clear as much of the infection as possible prior to surgery and to allow time for more procedures to rule out any cancers as a cause. Luckily, cancer was not present.

I had the surgery in mid February. They removed my entire sigmoid colon, multiple internal reproductive organ structures and other nearby damaged tissue. The surgery went really well considering, and while my belly is covered in incisions and I have some pain from the scar tissues and adhesions, healing up and adjusting to my new physiology seems to be going well also.

It has been hard to be under the weight of the worry and stress about money and losing housing throughout all of this and even if this fundraiser is able to buy just a little bit of extra time to figure out a long term solution that would make the biggest difference in my life right now and give me some much need breathing room to grieve and continue healing and getting my body back as close to normal as possible.

Thank you for reading this. Please share this on social media and elsewhere if you are willing to.

With Love, Murphy