MAJOR NEWS! Thank you for all of your tremendous support and encouragement for our family. We are so proud of our mom, Christine, as she battles the horrible effects of ALS.

We have prayed for her to get some sort of relief and we believe God answered our prayers.

Through friends, we have met Moira Scully Papp from the Chicago area. She also had ALS.

We are now going for it!!!

We are now in the process of getting to The BTT Medical Institute!! We have our online consultation meeting in a few weeks and we are over the moon with HOPE. It’s truly hard to wrap our head around this opportunity but Moira is living proof. She is written up in a paper by Dr. Abreu and Yale University. Her ALS HAS BEEN REVERSED. Here is the link of the article about her progress. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41294911/

This is unfortunately not covered by insurance yet, so we ask you for your generosity. We all know how helpless we can all feel with this diagnosis and we now FEEL HOPE. Hope to stop the progression, hope to reverse what it has done to our beautiful family.

Please send this around. Maybe it can help someone else as well! Moira taught me that Connections = God!

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Hello to all! Before I explain further the premise of our GoFundMe for our beloved Mother, let me introduce our family for those of you who don’t know us as well. We are the Anderson family, locally from Chester, Vermont. A family who is full of avid skiers, and one aspiring ski racer, Ava (age 18), who currently attends Stratton Mountain School as a Senior. Our dad, Michael, worked at Stratton Mountain for close to forty years, starting as a lift-attendant and eventually working his way up all the way to fill the role as assistant ski patrol director. He sadly recently retired right after the New Year to be significantly more available to care for our Mom, his Wife, life partner and best friend. To continue, when he is not saving lives on the mountain, you will find him all over Southern Vermont and New Hampshire, most likely heading somewhere to landscape, designing beautiful patios and shrubbery work. Adding to this, our third wonderful member of the family, William (age 20), who currently attends Elon University, in North Carolina, as a Sophomore, who works tirelessly to study for his future career. Walking alongside us on all fours are our two rambunctious dogs, Nicky who has taken the head companion role for our Mom and Gus who you will always find with our Dad in the passenger seat of his truck with his head out the window, hoping to go on a new adventure.

Now to tell you about our Mom, Christine. She is the fourth member of our team and why you have taken the time and clicked on this link. She is the piece that completes our puzzle, with a laugh everyone loves to hear and a smile bigger than any I’ve ever seen, even now through her diagnosis. Our life was completely flipped upside down a little over a year ago when we found out, after countless hours of doctor’s appointments and every kind of neurological test under the sun, that she unfortunately has ALS, known as Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis or Lou Gehrig’s disease. To answer your questions, yes, currently in our present day, there is no cure, as they do not know what the catalyst is. This means it is 100% fatal, typically within 2-5 years after diagnosis. To give you the basics, it is a neurological disease that attacks the motor neurons, leading to severe muscle weakness and eventually paralysis. In specific to Christine, based on blood test results in the past, the root cause to her case of ALS is most likely related to Neurological Lyme Disease, as her blood levels were positive for all three variants of Lyme, in addition to other infections. Our Mom went from walking, talking, and doing things like going to see the Boston Ballet last December, to being completely paralyzed in her legs, fully wheelchair dependent, unable to verbally communicate, and do any task without the assistance of at least one person, all of this changing in a little over a year.

No one, our family, friends, and anyone else in our lives, could have ever predicted this to happen to one of the most important people in our life. To go along with the emotional and physical price all of us, but most importantly our Mom, has to pay, there is also a very large bill constantly being added to as the days push on through her illness. This fall, we hired her a private at home aid, Marie, who we couldn’t be more grateful for, as she plays a significant role in the help our Mom needs. Her help is so important to us, as our Mom loves her, but it is also costly. Our family is not the wealthiest out there, we have what we need and enough for some of the wants, but with the recent retirement of our Dad, we have no main source of income at this time. In the long run, things are only to get more expensive, with further medical care or possible equipment, along with the continued help from Marie, all being paid out of pocket and not covered by insurance due to the choices that were decided when the diagnosis was confirmed last fall. To add to this, recent test results showed significant improvement in her Lyme levels, meaning further medication and tests will be pursued, as there is belief that if we can eliminate the Lyme, any worsening of her condition will completely stop. All of this on top of the regular life expenses, two school tuitions to be paid for, and maybe something to add a little more dopamine to our days, hangs a large list of expenses over our heads, simply adding to the stress.

The last year has been hands down the hardest year for our entire family, not just financially, but also emotionally. It is hard for some to understand how it is to navigate something so difficult like this, with that being said I ask you to please go and give a loved one a big hug or tell someone you love them. Life can take unexpected turns and it is important to live each day as much as you possibly can. There is no more “normal” for our family, things have changed forever, but we are so grateful we are the ones who can be there for our Christine, the most perfect Wife and Mother we could have been gifted with.

All of what you have read above leads me to say, we could use your help too. It is difficult to ask for, but we have made the decision to reach out for your financial support for the second time. Any contribution, big or small, means and helps more than you know. Our family wants to and would do anything to help our Mom, because if any of these days feel long or exhausting for us, it is infinitely harder, longer, and more exhausting for her. To the strongest woman we know in our life, we love you more than you will ever know and want to be there for you as much as possible, never forget that. ❤️

Thank you all and wishing the happiest, healthiest New Year,

The Andersons