Let's Go Mo!

Dear friends and supporters,

With both gratitude and humility, I write to ask for your support in my efforts to recover from surgery at Memorial Sloan Kettering last month, after a very difficult year of prolonged illness.

Some of you are already aware of the long ride I've been on with my health, but for others this may come as a surprise. As I recently said to my therapist (officially the most NYC way to begin a sentence!), it's so hard to ask for money for myself, despite doing it often for the org's I love, because (a) It's hard to accept that we live in a "developed nation" where people have to beg friends & strangers to help them stay alive; and (b) We live in a society (second most NYC way to begin a sentence!) where an artist's perceived success is hitched to their perceived net worth. I'm here to confess that I'm broke and I need your help.

Just over a year ago my employer created a bogus excuse to lay me off, just as I was getting very sick. I did manage to stretch a little less than 3 months' pay out over a year, thanks to a Rauschenberg Foundation Medical Emergency Grant, but my health continued to spiral.

Finally, after months of unproductive tests, the ER at NYU Langone *incidentally* (accidentally, while looking for something else--which is how most ovarian cancer is detected!) found that I had a large tumor on my right ovary and a second lesion on my spleen. I jumped ship to Memorial Sloan Kettering in hopes of getting more focused, cancer-specific care, and I had a big surgery last month, from which I'm still recovering.

Some friends and neighbors reading this have already been so generous in sending or making food, doing my laundry, and walking Browser, and I will forever be grateful for both the help and the deeper ways that these gifts have touched me. But now I am really fighting to keep going.

Not surprisingly, Medicaid won't cover the secondary (/tertiary) medications and treatments that I need, my bank account is a couple thousand dollars overdrawn, my art storage unit contents will be auctioned in a couple weeks, HRA's process of applying for benefits has been very protracted and inaccessible (though I persist), and every bill I have from utilities to my domain name(s) are overdue and minutes from termination. I told you this was humbling. :(

They say that the average cancer fundraiser asks for $20k and receives only $3k. Let's please try to beat those odds. By this time next year, I want to be alive and kicking, but it's not an exaggeration to say that I desperately need your help.

Thanks so much for reading & sharing, in any way you can.

Truly, any amount helps.

~ mo