Support Kaitlyn’s family with funeral expenses

We are hoping to raise some money to help my mom and younger sister out with medical expenses. My sister, Kaitlyn, is a chronically ill 21-year-old who was born with multiple heart defects and is unable to work and lives at home because of her current health issues. She has had six open heart surgeries in childhood and has been treated at the University of Michigan hospital in Ann Arbor for her entire life; her first stay being days after she was born, when she was flown from Traverse City hospital she was born at to Ann Arbor to be treated. In 2019, after a long wait on the transplant list, she was given a heart transplant. The recovery was hard and she was in the hospital away from her family for months before she was able to come home. After her recovery, we were hopeful that she would go a long time before needing another heart. However, the medicine she was given after the transplant left her with a severely weakened immune system and after getting sick with Covid multiple times she is now experiencing heart and kidney failure and requires a transplant for both.

Since the first time we went through this process my mother, Jennifer, has ended a toxic relationship with her ex-husband and is now left to support their three youngest children who still live at home and handle all of Kaitlyn's health issues on her own with no support from him of any kind. She often misses days sometimes weeks of work to take Kaitlyn to dialysis treatments, checkups 4 hours away in Ann Arbor with her doctors, and frequent emergency stays that can happen randomly and for unknown lengths of time.

Kaitlyn is currently waiting to be added to the transplant list again, but it is going to be a much more complex surgery this time. Because of this, her current hospital has decided that they cannot do the surgery and that we will have to find another hospital that is better equipped to handle her case. Chicago and Cleveland are our best choices but both of these options will leave my mother with increased travel times and expenses along with insurance complications that will come with going out of state.

We are uncertain what financial complications are going to come from this. My mom and sisters are already struggling to get by as it is after leaving my dad in the fall of 2023 and with this new complication added they are facing more missed work, the possibility of medical debt if her insurance won't cover out-of-state treatment, and much more added stress while we are trying to get everything sorted with finding a new hospital to treat her.

We are grateful to the friends and family who have been helping my mom and sisters through this hard time and appreciate any financial support that can be given to help as well.