Rally for Quinn: Giving Her Hope for Her Future

I am Rita Leigh, proud wife of Douglas Leigh and stepmom to his outstanding daughter Quinn Leigh.

This is a story of how a car wreck could have saved someone's life.

Quinn was rear-ended by a truck one month ago. She was knocked unconscious for a bit but came to just as police reached the scene. Upon her insistence that she was fine, no one took her to the hospital. The next day at work, her employer insisted that she go get checked out as she was on company time at the time of the accident. There they did a Cat Scan immediately; they found that there was a fairly large tumor growing on the other side of her brain!!

While shocking enough in itself, just 2 months earlier, Quinn had lost her mother to a brain tumor called a Glioblastoma. From diagnosis to her death was less than 2 weeks. Now here Quinn is with a tumor. This is a bizarre but true set of circumstances.

Since the time of the accident, Quinn is working diligently to schedule a surgery. However, this has been made more difficult by the fact that at her job she has no health insurance. Doctors are reluctant to schedule until this issue is resolved.

Quinn is working with the hospital to obtain insurance through the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) which will hopefully cover much of her expensive brain surgery in addition to post-operative care, which includes months of radiation and chemo.

What is not being covered is her monthly expenses, including her mortgage, utilities, car, groceries, etc.

Bottom line is that without this initial surgery, she does not know where she stands in terms of a long-term prognosis. Two more MRI appointments have been completed. The initial surgery will remove a portion of the tumor, which will be sent to pathology where they will determine first if the mass is cancer (the neurologist says that he is sure it is with 95% accuracy). Then they will classify the tumor type and the severity. This will then allow the doctors to formulate a treatment protocol.

As you can see, the road is a long one, and for a person with very limited income (light part-time work) at this time, along with insurance issues, and the prospect of not working for a good long while, Quinn needs help.

Quinn is a fiercely independent young woman who just celebrated her 34th birthday. It has taken several weeks to talk her into asking for this type of help, but it seems she is slowly realizing that help is truly needed.

With the love and support of her friends and family members, it is our goal to give her a future.