The Dauss Family

Hi Everyone. My name is Liz Kidd. I’m Christopher Dauss’ aunt.

Recently, Chris and Kim’s 16 month old twins, Finley & Meredith, were admitted to Children’s Hospital as both were having seizures. After enduring much testing, the girls have been diagnosed with epilepsy. Although they are at home now and are on medication, the seizures continue. It will take some time, some adjustment of medication and further testing to figure out how to minimize or rid these babies of their seizures. Let’s band together as a community around this young family. While we can’t take away the fear or worry that comes with navigating sick kids, we can join forces to help alleviate the financial stress that comes with the mounting medical bills associated with long term treatment and care of children with chronic illness. ❤️

An update from Kim and Chris:

Hi everyone! Chris and I would like to thank each and every one of you who have donated, shared, thought of and/ or prayed for us and our girls! Your love and kindness is truly appreciated, and we are so grateful to have your support. We also want to send the biggest thank you to Chris’s Aunt Liz, for having the forethought to understand the financial stress to come from Finley’s and Meredith’s medical care, and starting the GoFundMe on behalf of our family. Without your support, we would not know what to do. ❤️

I wanted to give everyone an update on how the girls are doing and to let you know how your donations will be used. When this GoFundMe was initially set up we had no idea what our medical bills would be, what their medication costs would look like, and what future testing would be needed. And while we still have a lot of unknowns, what we do know, is that because of your help, we will be able to cover a large majority of the unexpected medical bills that the girls accrued while being admitted and diagnosed. We are eternally grateful!

Meredith and Finley each had an EEG while admitted almost two weeks ago, which did confirm that the episodes they were having are in fact seizures. With this knowledge, our team of neurologists/ epileptologists wanted to have MRIs completed to rule out any brain abnormalities. Thankfully, the MRIs were negative/ clear, but also leave us with even more unknowns. Since Finley was having more seizures than Meredith, the doctors suggested to have genetic testing sent off site for her, with the assumption that Meredith will have the same results given they are identical twins. Should the genetic results come back with something, we will be sending off bloodwork for Meredith, as well as Josephine, to make sure that we do not need to be concerned with any similar health issues. We are hoping to have these results back by the end of the month to be able to discuss the next steps with our team of doctors.

Currently, we are still in the data collection phase of this diagnosis and tracking how many seizures the girls are still having each day, at what time, and what is happening when they occur in hopes of establishing any trends. Both girls have been prescribed Keppra to help manage their seizure activity and so far this treatment regimen has helped dramatically, but we still have room for improvement. With a goal of zero seizure activity, Meredith still continues to have 1-3 seizures a day and Finley up to 8. We know it will take some time and modifications to medications, but are choosing to stay hopeful that we will soon find a regimen that gets us to our goal of zero.

For now, once we achieve zero seizures, the girls will stay on that regimen for at least 2 years and must remain seizure free for at least 2 years before we consider stopping treatment. While we are not certain if this is something that the girls will simply out grow, or if it is something that they will face for the rest of their lives, we will get through it thanks to your love and support. We will continue to take things day by day, and follow the advice of our medical team to try to live and maintain our normal lives. The relief of much of the stress from pending financial obligations has been a Godsend, and will help us focus on the girls. Once we have more answers, I will be sure to update everyone.

As many of us know, healthcare in America is not what it could be. With this admission alone, the care so far for our girls has met our family deductible of $10,000 as well as our out-of-pocket maximum of almost $15,000. Ridiculously, medications are not included in that total, but will hopefully remain manageable. Having worked in healthcare for 5 years myself, I figured our bills would be rather large. I don’t think I fully grasped just how large, however, until seeing the initial totals. And there are still more to come. It is an eye opening realization of how our lives, health and financial situation can be drastically affected by such high medical costs. We owe so many of you virtual (and in person) hugs. We are so, so grateful for your support.

We would love to send a personal thank you for all the donations, so if you included your name with your donation, I will reach out to you personally. If you chose to stay anonymous, we respect your privacy but would still like to send you a personal thank you too. If you are comfortable, please message Liz with your address by clicking the “Contact” button under the “Organizer and Beneficiary” section. We will post periodic updates when we have something new to share. Thank you! ❤️