OK, all you Arlington High School people that I should’ve arrested back in the day but didn’t - LOL! Our girl needs our help! As many of you know, Marissa is like a daughter to me. If you have followed along with her posts, you know that she was severely injured at work several years ago and went through several surgeries to fix her neck and hands to be able to walk and not have numb fingers. Because she was off for so long healing and her surgeon couldn’t release her back to work, her company let her go after 23 years of hard work and employment! So, she pulled up her bootstraps and found another job in the medical field that she really loved as she felt she was helping people struggling with orthopedic care, like she was. Seven months ago, after saving the company a ton of money a month in logistics costs, they decided to lay her off due to budget cuts (basically used her) and that was the start of her spiral. She got unemployment for a few months, but that has run out months ago and wasn’t enough to live on and pay all the bills anyway, and her savings has now run out! Too young to retire, too young to pull any 401k without massive penalties which will just hurt her again later in life anyway, and she is at her wits' end trying to survive. She has done an array of different jobs in her life and is a hard, loyal, and dedicated worker. She has put over 70 applications in, but because she’s “older” and there are so many people unemployed right now, she is having a hard time even getting any jobs that she is more than qualified for to even interview her. She has many years in logistics and transportation, management (various industries), private investigation, sales, dispatching, running youth sports camps, customer service, and some administrative work. Please let me know if you know of any companies looking for a great employee. In the meantime, she’s really struggling to make ends meet and keep her sanity with all the job rejections and needs our help! She lives in a modest 1-bedroom apartment with her cat, drives a 2014 car – those of you that know her know she is not glitz and glamour. She has a little part-time gig she’s doing at night, but it’s not enough to pay the bills and it doesn’t offer any benefits or health insurance, and everything is stacking up! Because of her part-time job, she doesn’t qualify for Medi-Cal and Covered CA is going to cost her $472 a month for a regular HMO, but she has to have insurance so she needs to pay it. It is a flawed system to charge that much when you’re making very little. From all the sports and hiking and walking and jumping in and out of trucks for a living, her knees are now bone on bone, she has an ACL tear in the left one and needs both knees replaced. In the meantime, she needs to get some knee injections to manage the pain. Her parents are older and on a limited income and just aren’t able to help her in any significant way. I don’t want to see her lose her place and be living in her car with her cat! So, if you would please help me help her out, we would both be so appreciative! She was too embarrassed and has too much pride to initiate the GoFundMe herself and wanted to keep her issues on the down low, but I told her you have a lot of friends out there and you were a good friend to a lot of people, so I’m sure they would be willing to help, you just have to ask! So here we are reaching out in kind hopes that if you are able to donate, you will. I would like to raise enough to get her caught up, but also enough so she has some to lean on the next few months while she still tries to land a job. The stress of all this has taken her joy and is just dragging her down. Thank you for helping our girl!

Christine (Keers) Sheffield