Help Yannick Survive His Crushing Medical Expenses
Donation protected
Hi! My name is Yannick. I’m a writer and journalist currently living in Ohio where I’m studying to become a social worker. I’ve been having an ongoing health crisis that began in October and will very likely take until late December or early January of next year to permanently resolve. It has already cost me an incredible amount of money and even more of my time and energy. This health crisis has put me into more frightening and physically painful experiences and situations than I have ever been in before in my life. I’ve had to stop working on a number of freelance writing projects I was involved in up until my health crisis started demanding all of my time and energy, and this also means that I’ve lost out on a lot of expected future income I was relying on to get through the rest of my first year of grad school. At the same time, my medical bills have spiked dramatically and will only continue to climb over the next three or four months.
While my student health insurance plan has been very supportive in many ways in covering many of the different doctors’ appointments, surgical exams, and meetings with specialists, I have also had to pay for many things out of pocket and will continue to do so. I'm not sure why this has been the case, though I suspect part of it has to do with COVID complications making hospitals overrun and desperate to triage patients as quickly as possible, but I have been forced to take many different expensive tests to rule out other possible diagnoses or causes for my intense physical pain when I have always been confident that the pain is being caused by a hernia--or hernias. Despite this, doctors avoided giving me a CT scan and instead required me to go through things like a colonoscopy (costing a little over $700) and multiple specialist appointments and consultations, all of which just added to the overall pile of medical bills.
When I finally did manage to get a CT scan (which cost about $1000 on its own), it confirmed that I have two separate hernias. The thing about hernias is that once they advance to a certain level, they require surgery to permanently repair. Both of my hernias are at that level already. But, because of the particularities of my student loan terms, if I take medical leave, my student loan and scholarship disbursements will be interrupted. Hernias are also treated as a non-emergency condition unless they become strangulated, which means that even though I'm regularly in incredible amounts that makes it hard if not impossible to get anything done, I've been told to just sit and wait until December or January at the earliest to get them surgically repaired.
Simply put: I really need all the help I can get right now. I’m in a profoundly challenging situation that is overwhelming me psychologically, emotionally, physically and financially all at once. I’m in legitimately dire financial straits, and I need all the help I can get. Anything you can afford to spare to help this campaign will go a long, long way in helping me continue to find and access the healthcare I need so badly right now. Your help is also, quite honestly, one of the only things that might be able to help save me from going into irreversible or inescapable financial ruin while I continue navigating this fraught and disturbing journey through Ohio and America’s healthcare system. I’ve finally started making progress, but the road to recovery is long, painful, and expensive.
The thing about sudden health emergencies and ongoing medical complications, in my experience and based on what I've heard from many friends and clients of my own who have been through similar kinds of struggles, is that they start to seep into all other aspects of your life as well. And this means that other costs begin to appear outside the domain of official medical or hospital bills. Between the extreme pain and Ohio’s restrictive drug laws, I’ve had to spend a LOT of money out of pocket on pain management for a full month already, for instance. And I will likely have to continue shelling out for another 2-3 months at least. My car had also taken a beating during the move from North Carolina to Ohio. And while that wasn't much of an issue when I was luckily able to go to class and work remotely for the most part, suddenly needing to drive all over northeast Ohio for 20-30 different doctor’s appointments already (and there are still many more to come), and make a lot more runs to the pharmacy and grocery store meant that I needed to get my car fixed much more quickly--and thus expensively--than I otherwise would have been able to get it repaired.
All of this has completely depleted any savings and financial reserves I’d been able to save from my previous career in media and technology. I am asking for your support to help me cover these overwhelming out of pocket costs and survive and manage my extreme, often debilitating physical pain until I can finally be operated on in December. In addition to the sudden massive spike in my healthcare costs, managing these issues and my severe chronic pain means I’ve also lost a great deal of expected future income because this crisis has been going on for so long now. It isn’t going to go away anytime soon either. I haven’t been able to look for, let alone successfully complete, any of the freelance writing and editing I’ve almost always managed to make a living off of for a solid decade now. I was already in a precarious financial position--as so many people are right now because of COVID--given that I was starting grad school full-time with basically no savings on hand and only having taken out the absolute minimum amount of federal loans I thought I could get away with. I probably could and should have budgeted for more of a rainy day than I did, to be fair, but I also don’t think most people would have told me to account for having two extremely painful hernias and emergency-level inflammation throughout my GI tract all at the same time the same semester I was starting grad school. I haven’t been paid for any of the freelance writing I actually have been able to do since I started school, meanwhile, and as anyone who’s worked as a freelancer will tell you, those checks can take a very long time to show up.
All money given to this GoFundMe will be used to pay for my steep and ongoing health expenses and related accommodations I need to set up for myself to be able to keep doing my school and freelance work as best I can until I get the surgery I need to permanently resolve this health crisis. If there is anything left over after I settle all my debts and officially run out of options getting my health insurance company and university and various employers to reimburse me for, I will donate all of it to a group of organizations dedicated to helping resolve the ongoing and horrifying opioid crisis this country is being wracked by. It’s very surreal and ironic, but I’m actually in school right now to study very similar kinds of issue--I’m getting a Master’s of Social Work with a specialization in substance use disorders and recovery. I decided to pursue this degree specifically because I found the opioid epidemic so disturbing on so many different levels. After seeing multiple people I loved struggle with issues related to substance use, I became increasingly distressed by the level of services available to so many people, and decided I wanted to try and help do something about it. Going through this current medical emergency that’s put me in more intense physical pain for much longer periods of time than I’ve ever been through before only makes me more convinced that this is an important cause to devote myself to. While I have thankfully never struggled with opioid use myself, many people who have and continue to were first introduced to these drugs by way of things like prescriptions for acute and/or chronic physical pain. Cutting them off from these drugs after irresponsibly over-prescribing them for years the way that our healthcare system has only made things worse for so many people, particularly in areas like Northeast Ohio.
Please help me get back on my feet so I can return to doing this important work full-time as soon as I possibly can. And thank you so much for your kindness, empathy, and generosity. I am making this GoFundMe because I noticed that I was starting to ask my closest personal friends and family for larger and larger sums of money on an individual basis, and it occurred to me that I could ease the burden on each of us individually if there is any chance that more people can help out as well. Even if it’s only a few more people, and even if it’s only a few more people giving two or five or maybe even ten bucks each, every single contribution helps. Every single dollar and cent helps me get put back into one piece (metaphorically and literally speaking) and going in the right direction. Like every one of the kind and heartfelt messages I’ve heard from different friends and connections and even extremely distant passing acquaintances, it gives me hope. And I really need as much of that as I can possibly get right now. Thank you so much again for reading my story and for helping me get back on my feet in this dark, trying, scary time.
While my student health insurance plan has been very supportive in many ways in covering many of the different doctors’ appointments, surgical exams, and meetings with specialists, I have also had to pay for many things out of pocket and will continue to do so. I'm not sure why this has been the case, though I suspect part of it has to do with COVID complications making hospitals overrun and desperate to triage patients as quickly as possible, but I have been forced to take many different expensive tests to rule out other possible diagnoses or causes for my intense physical pain when I have always been confident that the pain is being caused by a hernia--or hernias. Despite this, doctors avoided giving me a CT scan and instead required me to go through things like a colonoscopy (costing a little over $700) and multiple specialist appointments and consultations, all of which just added to the overall pile of medical bills.
When I finally did manage to get a CT scan (which cost about $1000 on its own), it confirmed that I have two separate hernias. The thing about hernias is that once they advance to a certain level, they require surgery to permanently repair. Both of my hernias are at that level already. But, because of the particularities of my student loan terms, if I take medical leave, my student loan and scholarship disbursements will be interrupted. Hernias are also treated as a non-emergency condition unless they become strangulated, which means that even though I'm regularly in incredible amounts that makes it hard if not impossible to get anything done, I've been told to just sit and wait until December or January at the earliest to get them surgically repaired.
Simply put: I really need all the help I can get right now. I’m in a profoundly challenging situation that is overwhelming me psychologically, emotionally, physically and financially all at once. I’m in legitimately dire financial straits, and I need all the help I can get. Anything you can afford to spare to help this campaign will go a long, long way in helping me continue to find and access the healthcare I need so badly right now. Your help is also, quite honestly, one of the only things that might be able to help save me from going into irreversible or inescapable financial ruin while I continue navigating this fraught and disturbing journey through Ohio and America’s healthcare system. I’ve finally started making progress, but the road to recovery is long, painful, and expensive.
The thing about sudden health emergencies and ongoing medical complications, in my experience and based on what I've heard from many friends and clients of my own who have been through similar kinds of struggles, is that they start to seep into all other aspects of your life as well. And this means that other costs begin to appear outside the domain of official medical or hospital bills. Between the extreme pain and Ohio’s restrictive drug laws, I’ve had to spend a LOT of money out of pocket on pain management for a full month already, for instance. And I will likely have to continue shelling out for another 2-3 months at least. My car had also taken a beating during the move from North Carolina to Ohio. And while that wasn't much of an issue when I was luckily able to go to class and work remotely for the most part, suddenly needing to drive all over northeast Ohio for 20-30 different doctor’s appointments already (and there are still many more to come), and make a lot more runs to the pharmacy and grocery store meant that I needed to get my car fixed much more quickly--and thus expensively--than I otherwise would have been able to get it repaired.
All of this has completely depleted any savings and financial reserves I’d been able to save from my previous career in media and technology. I am asking for your support to help me cover these overwhelming out of pocket costs and survive and manage my extreme, often debilitating physical pain until I can finally be operated on in December. In addition to the sudden massive spike in my healthcare costs, managing these issues and my severe chronic pain means I’ve also lost a great deal of expected future income because this crisis has been going on for so long now. It isn’t going to go away anytime soon either. I haven’t been able to look for, let alone successfully complete, any of the freelance writing and editing I’ve almost always managed to make a living off of for a solid decade now. I was already in a precarious financial position--as so many people are right now because of COVID--given that I was starting grad school full-time with basically no savings on hand and only having taken out the absolute minimum amount of federal loans I thought I could get away with. I probably could and should have budgeted for more of a rainy day than I did, to be fair, but I also don’t think most people would have told me to account for having two extremely painful hernias and emergency-level inflammation throughout my GI tract all at the same time the same semester I was starting grad school. I haven’t been paid for any of the freelance writing I actually have been able to do since I started school, meanwhile, and as anyone who’s worked as a freelancer will tell you, those checks can take a very long time to show up.
All money given to this GoFundMe will be used to pay for my steep and ongoing health expenses and related accommodations I need to set up for myself to be able to keep doing my school and freelance work as best I can until I get the surgery I need to permanently resolve this health crisis. If there is anything left over after I settle all my debts and officially run out of options getting my health insurance company and university and various employers to reimburse me for, I will donate all of it to a group of organizations dedicated to helping resolve the ongoing and horrifying opioid crisis this country is being wracked by. It’s very surreal and ironic, but I’m actually in school right now to study very similar kinds of issue--I’m getting a Master’s of Social Work with a specialization in substance use disorders and recovery. I decided to pursue this degree specifically because I found the opioid epidemic so disturbing on so many different levels. After seeing multiple people I loved struggle with issues related to substance use, I became increasingly distressed by the level of services available to so many people, and decided I wanted to try and help do something about it. Going through this current medical emergency that’s put me in more intense physical pain for much longer periods of time than I’ve ever been through before only makes me more convinced that this is an important cause to devote myself to. While I have thankfully never struggled with opioid use myself, many people who have and continue to were first introduced to these drugs by way of things like prescriptions for acute and/or chronic physical pain. Cutting them off from these drugs after irresponsibly over-prescribing them for years the way that our healthcare system has only made things worse for so many people, particularly in areas like Northeast Ohio.
Please help me get back on my feet so I can return to doing this important work full-time as soon as I possibly can. And thank you so much for your kindness, empathy, and generosity. I am making this GoFundMe because I noticed that I was starting to ask my closest personal friends and family for larger and larger sums of money on an individual basis, and it occurred to me that I could ease the burden on each of us individually if there is any chance that more people can help out as well. Even if it’s only a few more people, and even if it’s only a few more people giving two or five or maybe even ten bucks each, every single contribution helps. Every single dollar and cent helps me get put back into one piece (metaphorically and literally speaking) and going in the right direction. Like every one of the kind and heartfelt messages I’ve heard from different friends and connections and even extremely distant passing acquaintances, it gives me hope. And I really need as much of that as I can possibly get right now. Thank you so much again for reading my story and for helping me get back on my feet in this dark, trying, scary time.
Organizer
Yannick LeJacq
Organizer
Lakewood, OH
