Let’s help Jess get skin removal surgery!

Hi my name is Hannah and I’m Jessica’s sister. This makes me uniquely qualified to override her discomfort and ask for help on her behalf.

Jess has done the very hard work of losing 145 pounds. To put that into perspective, that’s roughly 17 gallons of milk or about 5 cases of water worth of weight. All of the weight lost with diet and exercise alone. She’s done that while dealing with knees so bad she needs them both replaced, juggling her job, looking after and helping out our parents, raising her kids, helping out at our parent’s shop, and now starting another part time job to help scrape together the money she needs for these surgeries.

Losing the amount of weight that she has comes with some serious side effects and the hardest to function with would be the excess skin she has kicked butt to get. Getting both of her knees replaced is a necessity at this point. She’s got bone on bone in those areas along with extensive tendon, tissue, and muscle damage. In order for the replacements to heal their best, and to give herself the best odds of safer surgery, she wants to remove the roughly 15-20 pounds worth of skin around her abdomen which would be an additional 60-80 pounds of pressure off those joints.

So what would your donation go towards? It would be the overall cost of the skin removal surgery (a procedure not covered by insurance), wages she misses out on during her recovery, and most importantly you’d be giving her time.

Jess started this whole weight loss journey because she was so sick and tired of wasting time and living life from the sidelines. She’s (literally and figuratively) worked her ass off to lose this weight so she can be more present in the life of those she loves the most. Unfortunately in order to save money she’s needed to take on more work and so now, even though she’s physically able to be more present with her family, she’s still watching their lives from the sidelines while she works as much as she can to earn money for these surgeries. Your donation would be immensely helpful in giving her the financial wiggle room needed for her to get off the sidelines again so she can be with her family more.

Jess is a remarkable human being. She’s spent most of her life dedicated to other people. From helping to watch over her three siblings at home while our parents worked hard to provide for us, to raising two kids of her own, to organizing her community to donate supplies during the pandemic so she could sew and donate over 4,000 masks, to being the front line in taking care of our parents - her whole life has been about being there for other people. I want to be there for her this time. Jess deserves so much happiness/relief and she’ll be the last one to believe that. Help me show her she’s worth all the work she’s put in and then some. Any donation is appreciated, thank you for your time!