Medical Fees for Patricia Sanabria, DC Educator

Hi, my name is Grace. I'm fundraising for my amazing sister Patricia. Last year, due to a bad fall that occurred 5+ years ago that led to years of increasingly excruciating pain, she had emergency surgery on her spine to treat a massively herniated disk that was cutting off her nerves. Now, just over a year after her first surgery, she is in terrible pain again, and an MRI revealed that the disk is deteriorating. She will need a second surgery for a lumbar fusion that will relieve her pain and mitigate the risk of paralyzation.

Patricia has been an educator to high school students in the District of Columbia for the past decade, teaching Special Education and High School English. Last month she completed her Masters of the Arts in Educational Transformation at Georgetown University's Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, graduating with a 3.9 GPA. She was born and raised in Washington, DC and became a teacher in DC specifically because she wanted to give back to the community that helped our mother raise us.

I am raising these funds for Patricia's medical bills as well as assisting her with cost of living expenses while she navigates this medical emergency in a transitionary period between graduate school and her next employment.

Patricia has a beautiful heart and has dedicated her life to educating and advocating for youth in DC. Please consider supporting her in this difficult time.

In her own words, here is Patricia's story:

Flashback to January of 2016. A blizzard hit DC and after returning from a trip to the store, I slipped on the painted concrete stairs inside my apartment building and fell down an entire flight of steps. My whole body was bruised. My jaw, my back, my hips, my shins. As a charter school teacher making $42,000 a year, I was too poor to afford a trip to the hospital or the doctor so like most low income people, I just hoped for the best. Five years passed and my back pain, which I had not yet realized was a result of that fall, was getting worse and worse. By March of 2021, even sitting in a chair was painful. By May the pain had spread to my left leg, and on the morning of July 1st, I woke up and as I tried to get out of bed, I fell to the ground because I could no longer walk. It felt like the muscles in my legs were being slowly, but violently ripped apart over and over and over again. By 2 am the following Sunday, with one fruitless trip to the ER already under my belt, all I could do was scream. The pain was not even coming in waves anymore. It was constant and there was literally nothing I could do to stop it. Three more days of all consuming pain and not even crawling, but dragging myself around my house because I could not stand, I finally decided to take every single medication I had been given all at once so I could sleep. When I woke up, my legs had gone completely numb and though I was still in pain, I was finally able to coherently talk to my chiropractor who told me to go back to the ER and demand an MRI. The diagnosis? Intractable pain. Massively herniated disc. Severe central canal stenosis. Complete obliteration of the spinal canal. High probability of progression to incontinence and complete paralysis of the legs. Cauda equina syndrome.

Now I am in pain all the time. There is a giant hole in my spine. I need a lumbar fusion and will likely need more spinal surgeries in my lifetime. Getting in and out of a car is difficult and requires extra time. My left leg is still numb from my thigh down to my toes. I cannot bend over, exercise in the ways I used to, sit, stand, or lay down for long periods of time. Some days the pain is dull and ever present. Other days it is severe and ever present. But I am in pain all the time. And the peculiar thing about it is that it is an invisible pain, much like the learning struggles I had as a child. When I need extra help it is not immediately obvious, so I have to ask for it. And even when I do, I often have to explain my very traumatizing experience for people to understand why a seemingly healthy young woman needs assistance.