Mark Odom's cancer fund

Hi friends, Mark here. My stage 4 cancer has mostly been holding stable with the amazing work of my doctors and help from my family. I do have to go to a lot of treatments and checkups though, but I don’t mind too much.

That brings me to my two problems. Just to make things tougher, I have developed a pair of fast growing cataracts. My Medicare covers 80 percent of that, but there are a lot of extra stuff that I need to pay for. The 20%, another optometrist visit, new glasses, because it would be 6 grand to fix everything and honestly, I’m used to wearing glasses anyway.

I have saved for unexpected emergencies and almost had enough to cover this and was looking forward to having better eyesight than I’ve had in quite awhile. But bad things seem to happen in bunches. On my way home on the Fourth of July, my car hit a small bump, no problem. The next morning, the driveway was covered with all the oil my car has ever held. After calling my favorite mechanic and a couple other VW experts, the diagnosis is probably the oil pan and maybe the oil intake. I also found that getting to the oil pan on my car is nowhere nearly as easy as the classic vehicles of our youth. Bummer. The repairs for my car at best are a bit more than everything that I have saved for emergencies.

If I could walk better(thanks cancer) I would just retire the car and hoof it to my doctors appointments and Uber everywhere else, but I need it to stay moderately independent.

I hate asking for a helping hand, but life has handed me a lemon or two. I can’t find any trustworthy mechanic that has the time to work on my car for a couple of weeks, so I don’t have to pay for this tomorrow, but Both my surgery and my car’s surgery are coming up at the same time.

If you can help, please do. If you can’t, I understand.

Thanks for reading,

Mark