Support Sam's Emergency Surgery and Medical Bills

Hi, I'm Bri. Fellow painter, business partner, chosen family, other half of Sam Rueter.

I met Sam back in 2017, we were both slinging art at the Charleston Night Market on weekends. Within that time, we've aided each other through groundbreaking healing, failed engagements, creative endeavors, and we've prioritized seeing the world together.

All the while, Sam has been managing a bizarre baseline of abdominal pain that we could never understand.

Sam has been in chronic pain since I met her. For years. In and out of specialists' offices, gastrointestinal, gynecological, dietary, you name it.

I've often wondered how she even functioned on a daily basis with the pain she would describe to me.

She diagnosed herself with endometriosis , a condition when left unchecked could result in infertility, not to mention gut-wrenching pain as a baseline existence, all the way through menopause. When she consulted the gyno, she was received with a head pat, told to take birth control, and that it's all normal hormonal activity she was experiencing.

The gaslighting within medical spaces for women is infuriating.

These medical bills of specialists were never covered by her insurance over the past 3 years, the $500 a month bill she was paying into. So she had to effectively stop paying for the insurance, to cover the costs independently.

Two days ago, while visiting family in upstate NY, she was rushed to the hospital with a pain even Sam couldn't endure any longer, and she had an emergency appendectomy, her appendix being 'extremely enflamed and leaking'.

Had she waited she would have died.

While under surgery, they found, yup, you guessed it, endometriosis, or external layers of scar tissue outside her uterus, where it is not supposed to be.

I feel very hopeful to know what she's dealing with, finally.

Now we can treat it, finally.

It's no secret that so many medical and insurance systems are failing us, in ways that feel quite hopeless. People need help, and then their financial world is flipped upside down, just for seeking the help.

I watch Sam contribute so much to her world, on a regular basis. She's been tirelessly working on her writing, to reach and give voice to issues that help others feel a little less alone. She has been co-leading women's retreats for 3 years now, helping women find the community they so badly need, and has yet to take a single paycheck for this effort. Sam is the shoulder for so many of our people to lean on, myself included, to a fault.

It's her essence to care, and to give away.

Bills for the emergency appendectomy yesterday, the ambulance, the hospital stay, CT scans, plus the thousands in bills she's accumulated over the last three years in her quest for help, with no help from insurance, is reaching beyond $40k at this point.

If we cannot rely on our systems, maybe we can at least rely on our community.

Because Sam would not ask for help, yet I cannot think of anyone who deserves it more.

Thank you for reading.

Bri