Our nephew Mark

Hi my name is Joan & my sister Tricia as well as the rest of our family & myself want to introduce you to our nephew Mark & we are looking for...

A Miracle for mark

It seems that everywhere you go you've heard someone who's had an experience with Covid. Some have been hard times, some have been easy times and some experiences have been heart wrenching. Who would have thought three years ago our entire way of life would be changed because of Covid.

But, for some people, the change is extreme and it doesn't end with the initial Covid infection. My nephew, Mark Salvesen, is one of those people. He’s 41 years old and is no longer the man he used to be. Mark is the kind of person who puts others first. He’s fun and funny, thoughtful and kind, smart and well read, and he has always lived life to the fullest. He loves music. He played guitar everyday and wrote music. He played in a band called Lame Excuse and even recorded a few albums. He had plans to record another album in 2023. He lives with his wonderful partner of over 15 years, Melissa, and they gardened together, hiked together, loved to go to concerts in New York and Boston together. They enjoyed old small towns and antique shops and thrift shops. Mark was an avid hiker and climbed Mt Kilimanjaro years ago. He shared his love of camping and hiking with his cousins and changed their view of the world through some of the trips he took them on. He lived life and shared it with others. Now, he can’t do any of those things. Mark is always giving his time to the people in his life. When I cared for his grandparents he was there helping, visiting, caring for them and giving me relief. His mothers mom is still alive and until Covid hit he visited her in New Jersey every few months. He is a loyal friend, a loving son, a devoted partner, and a giving soul who thinks of others before himself always. He has been a mentor for youth, advocated for parents with substance abuse working with them to get their lives back and become good parents. In his free time he signed up as a chaperone for children with a supervised visitation order assisting them as they visit

family members. He chose to commit to be a role model and mentor for the son of a friend who is a single mom. For the last seven years he’s taken him to sports events, invited him for weekends to spend time with he and Mellisa, teaching him about nature, camping, and hiking. And helping him grow up strong and proud. This is what Mark does. This is who Mark is.

Mark got Covid in March of 2022!Like many people he was sick, really sick, for about three weeks. Slowly but surely his symptoms started to subside and he started feeling like him self again. Until his body started behaving in ways he’d never experienced. His heart rate would spike to a resting rate of 150 or even higher. Other times it would drop super low. He would suffer from paralysis at night unable to move his legs and arms. He would get excruciating headaches or uncontrollable shakes. His digestive system was all over the place leaving him in severe pain and unable to leave the house. These are just a few of the things that his body was going through. It was hard for him to understand what was happening. He had not tested positive again why were these strange symptoms continuing? He struggled to find the energy to do the easiest of things never mind things like running errands, gardening, helping others or participating in social activities or even putting in a full days work. It’s difficult to work when you are in so much pain. Everything he loved to do has become a distant memory for him. 

Covid was not a one and done for him. He now suffers from something a lot of people have never heard of, Long Covid. That little bug that sometimes doesn't even show itself in some people has been hiding inside of him wreaking havoc inside of his body from head to toe physically and emotionally and mentally. He’s not the same person he was 11 months ago. He doesn’t look the same. He’s lost almost 40 pounds. He doesn’t feel the same, and he has only left the house for doctors appointments and work and those trips leave him exhausted depleted and emotionally drained sometimes for days. He wakes in the night sometimes struggling to breathe or having such heart palpitations he is sure he’s going to die. He’s said goodbye to his partner many times in the middle of the night for fear he won’t make it through. Only to wake up wanting to end it because it’s too much to have to go through another night like that again.

Covid kills. We all know that. But long Covid kills too. There are many examples of people with long Covid dying from the illness but worse there are many examples of people with long Covid dying because they couldn’t take the suffering any longer and they take their own life. I worry for Marks life. He’s made every effort to try to figure out what the heck is going on in his body, but no one seems to have any answers. He is getting to the point where he doesn’t have the energy to keep trying. But he needs to keep fighting. This long Covid thing is not understood by many doctors and there's no specialists or anyone who has an answer. Some doctors are still claiming it’s all in the patients head. He’s heard that more times than anyone should. Going from doctor to doctor searching for some thing that will give him some release, has given him little more than large medical bills and disappointment. Answers are hard to come by right now and every doctor he goes to sends him to someone else who may have an answer. Which ends up being just another bill. And these bills are piling up. He’s already ten’s of thousands of dollars behind.

Mark needs someone to advocate for him like he has done for others for so many years. That’s why I’ve started this Go-Fund-Me page. I can’t give him answers on how he can get better but I can get him help to pay for the doctors who hopefully can soon.

So here I am with the help of my sister asking for your help and support and prayers. Sometimes it takes a village to make a difference in someone's life and I know that our village is amazing. So with your help I hope Mark can come out of this with his life back. Together I hope we can smooth this difficult bump in his life's journey. We may not be able to fix him but we can help him get relief from the financial burden that medical bills can bring. Together we can help him live a happy healthy life so someday he can pay it forward. I know he will. That’s what Mark does! That’s who mark is!