From the time she was a teenager, Kenzie knew she wanted to be a teacher. She loved working with kids and sharing her passion for music with them. After earning her bachelor's degree in education, Kenzie began the career she loved - teaching music to elementary and middle school students in the public school system. She later earned her Master's degree researching At-Risk and Diverse Learners. Sassy, talented, and funny, her students loved her and often came back to visit her even after they graduated high school.
While Kenzie was diagnosed as a brittle Type 1 diabetic at 11 years old, she has had seizures from the time she was about 2 years old. Her health has often been a significant obstacle in achieving her goals. In 2011, a diabetic trigger caused seizure episodes leaving her in a coma in the ICU for three weeks. Since then, she has been officially diagnosed with epilepsy which after an accident in 2019 can no longer be controlled by medications. Her doctors tried other treatments, with limited success, she was then referred to the neurological medical team at University of Maryland consisting of over 15 doctors. From there, the neurosurgery division of the team was in charge of the studies and treatments to help identify a way to treat the seizures.
On July 13, 2021, Kenzie had the first of what is expected to be several brain surgeries. During the twelve-hour surgery, doctors implanted a series of sensors and probes in Kenzie's brain to gather information about her seizures and where they are coming from. After the surgery her seizure medicine was slowly reduced over several days, allowing her to have seizures so the medical team could gather data from the sensors in her brain. She ultimately had over 25 seizures which provided a significant amount of data to help develop her future treatments. She is currently is recovering from the second brain surgery that removed the sensors and is expected to undergo additional surgery in early 2022. This will give her some time to heal and give the team enough time to review all the data to best plan her treatment.
At this time, Kenzie and Ben are urgently in need of financial help. Because of the severity of her conditions and her extreme vulnerability to COVID, Kenzie was forced to leave her teaching position in the fall of 2020. This left Kenzie and Ben relying on only his limited income and health insurance. Unfortunately, insurance is only covering a small portion of the treatments Kenzie needs and her prescription coverage is minimal. Kenzie tried to apply for disability, but her application was denied and none of the other financial assistance they have applied for has come through. They have exhausted all their financial resources and without the extra support of disability, they have no way to pay the extensive medical bills for Kenzie's treatments in addition to their monthly expenses. Their anticipated medical expenses include hospital stays, surgeries, doctor appointments, testing, lab fees, physical and/or occupational therapy, medications, transportation and parking costs, etc. They hope that the goal amount will assist with paying for these treatments over the next ten to twelve months, allowing Kenzie to better focus on her recovery and Ben to focus on supporting her.
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