Penny (9!) having congenital scoliosis surgery

Penny, is the glowing wonderful child of myself and husband. She is 9 years old, smart as a whip and the creator of Pawsitivepins.com . she has been working within the local community for a year now, spreading "pawsitivity" to others around her selling her original artwork, pins and stickers. She has raised over $1000 in the past six months for animals and humans in need in our local community ranging from working with the SPCA of the the Triad, The Interactive Resource Center and Guilford Education Alliance here in Greensboro, NC.

Penny also has scoliosis, a curvature of the spine (like her father who is disabled from an extreme curvature+other health issues). She has worn a back brace for the past few years and done special therapy to help correct the curve, knowing that eventually in the future she would need surgery. we found out in December that her Spine doctor, Dr. Lloyd Hey of the Hey Clinic in Raleigh, NC, wants to go ahead and Operate. We will be meeting with him and his team in February to discuss the details with surgery following in March 2020.

We need two things coming up in the future:

1) a reliable, used car that we won’t have to fear breaking down leading up to, and after Penny's surgery.  We need this vehicle to be spacious enough inside to handle anything surgery throws at us to capably get her in and out with our limited physical abilities (this will also make it easier for us if the surgery ends up being smaller in magnitude) . we are aiming for a low mileage Honda Odyssey or Toyota Sienna mini van from 2008+. 

2) security that our mortgage/bills are covered through March and beyond Penny’s surgery to make sure we can 100% keep the focus on Penny, her recovery, and being able to travel back and forth from Greensboro to Raleigh during/post surgery, follow-ups and physical therapy. (4 hours round trip is going to put some wear and tear on a vehicle.

We have set the amount at $15,000 to help get us to that goal. I feel we should have done this a long time ago, instead of suffering in silence about how dire and horrible our situation has been. Perhaps stubborn and not wanting to ask for help. We kept finding a way and kept finding a way, and we have put all of our physical and mental energy into staying afloat on our own following Caroline's car wreck the morning after buying our home in December 2014. She was in a hit-and-run by two idiots in a stolen vehicle, blazing through a red light, going 45-55MPH, t-boning her on the driver side. We have survived purely on John's fixed income (and help from family) since April 2015. It’s been a rough, depressing slide into the abyss for both of us. Our dream turned to a nightmare in an instant going from one fully able bodied workhorse and one disabled person two two broken people barely able to scrape our daily household responsibilities together let alone much more.

We recognize there are many others in the world in much worse situations, but we are spent.  emotionally, physically, mentally, its just been too much for us, and we  just want Penny to have the best we can give her.  It is a scary time for us all (and especially her) and the idea of going through this with doctors two hours away with no idea what we will need yet but knowing we need reliable transportation has been a struggle. (We had already been scrounging to rent a car every few months for visits to Raleigh for checkups, brace adjustments, etc as we have had so many reliability problems with our cheap car breaking)