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Please help fund my daughter Zoey's health

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Hello, my name is Mark. I am raising money to help my daughter. She's 19 years old and has been sick her whole life. She's been to so many doctors that didn't help her. It started as a baby, and now at 19, she finally got a diagnosis. We're all very scared and need your help.

It started when she was a baby. She threw up every formula that they made for her. She had acid reflux, then colic, then it was lactose intolerance. As a small child, she always had a stomach ache. We took her to children's hospitals where they could find nothing wrong with her. As she got older, the doctors blamed it on stress and anxiety and told her she needed to go to therapy and take anxiety medicine. How can a baby have stress and anxiety, I said, but that was their diagnosis and they were not willing to look at anything else or try anything else.

It wasn't until she became a young adult at 18 and went to a general surgeon where he found her gallbladder was producing bile at a high rate. He ran tests and found the bile had been eating away at her stomach lining, and she had tons of little pinpoint ulcers throughout her stomach as well as the lining of her stomach was eaten away and so thin. She had gone through so much pain, and the doctor said she was probably the toughest patient he's ever had. We were happy we had answers, but more problems continued.

When she went back for a follow-up visit, the doctor realized that there was something else wrong, and she got a new diagnosis of superior mesenteric artery syndrome. They had to put in a feeding tube. Poor thing had to carry a feeding bag on a pole while she was in school. All the while, she's been in all this pain, she's been in college. She had to drop out of high school because she missed so many days, and the school was getting on us, even though her grades were stellar. She went into the GED program, where she rocked it and earned a full ride scholarship for a local community college. All the while this is going on, she's been a straight-A student. She's finishing up her last semester this May and had the whole world ahead of her, but nope, the forces that be were not going to allow that to happen.

She had extensive trouble with her feeding tube, and they realized that her stomach and small intestines were paralyzed and not functioning properly. They replaced the feeding tube with a j-tube (which is a feeding tube placed in the the middle of her small intestine). Finally, doing some blood work, they diagnosed her with pre-leukemia or cancer in the bone marrow. She will now be needing a port for chemo and taking bone marrow stimulant injections. Her medical journey has been long and exhausting for her but still not done. My beautiful, beautiful baby girl, sweet as can be, going through all this pain her whole life. Please help us. God help us. Thank you.
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Donations 

  • Anonymous
    • $50
    • 1 d
  • Michael Mellott
    • $50
    • 2 d
  • Anonymous
    • $10
    • 4 d
  • Megan Maloney
    • $50
    • 5 d
  • Moira and Walter Verbanic
    • $500
    • 6 d
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Organizer

Mark Sterbach
Organizer
Kansas City, MO

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