Hello world.

Our beloved Lindsay – sweet, kind, giant-hearted Lindsay, who has probably loaned you money and helped you move and sent you a handwritten greeting card, yes, that Lindsay – has cancer.

Maybe you know this already. Maybe you even know the details: oral cancer, partial tongue removal and reconstruction, skin grafts, feeding tube, radiation. In May, she was hospitalized for 7 days for her surgery - the complete removal of her tumor and surrounding lymph nodes, a transplant of muscle and skin from her arm to her tongue, and a skin graft from her leg to her arm. This summer, she underwent 30 days of head and neck radiation, known to be the most painful kind.

If you follow Lindsay online, you’ve probably mourned her diagnosis and celebrated the end of her radiation. Maybe you’ve sent messages and TikToks to try to ease the pain, anxiety, loss and tedium that have been her life for the past six months. Throughout this terrible ordeal, she has come to know, deeply, what it means to be loved, looked after and held by her community. It has been a profound experience for her to see how many people out there really care.

And now, she needs our help.

Of course Lindsay, who founded The Merry Outlaw and spent her pandemic creating an app to redistribute mutual aid across Kansas City (donating thousands of her personal money in the process), doesn’t want to ask for financial help for herself. But that’s how it goes in this country, right? Get diagnosed with a terrible illness, make a GoFundMe. Until we enact policies that cover the true costs of medical care, mutual aid will have to do. Good thing it’s so powerful and magic.

Lindsay was fortunate to have been fully employed and insured at the time of her diagnosis. But she’s now been without work (and pay) for six months, and even good insurance won’t cover the totality of the cost of cancer. She has drained her savings trying to pay for rent, copays, medications, therapies and other living expenses without income. Her illness caused severe weight loss which has required new clothing. She faces a lifetime of cancer- and radiation-related costs, including speech therapy, lymphedema therapy, continued scans, and dental treatment. Perhaps most cruelly of all, plenty of these medical costs remain unknown, seemingly at the whims of her insurance company.

Lindsay has been through an immensely difficult six months, and her doctors have warned that she still faces an uphill battle. Please help contribute to this fund to offset Lindsay’s living and medical expenses during this awful time. Help her focus on recovery from cancer, rather than financial stress.

In the spirit of The Merry Outlaw, and as testament to the radical power of mutual aid, any unused funds after Lindsay’s recovery will be rolled into a fund to help others in Kansas City navigate the costs of healthcare.

Thank you all! Mutual aid is magic!

-Lindsay's friends, Kelsey and Hannah

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