⋆⁺URGENT DIAGNOSIS NEEDED FOR KAREN's SURVIVAL₊⋆

On January 14th 2022 Karen, a mother of two beautiful children and collective care advocate, went into the Fort Belvoir Community Hospital believing they had an extremely painful bug bite on their scalp which refused to heal.

Unfortunately, this was not a simple medical need but rather a very complicated ongoing condition that has left Karen debilitated, immunocompromised and battling continual painful infections including pneumonia, tinea capitis (fungal infection of the scalp), staphylococcus, bacterial infections such as folliculitis as well as ear infections causing conductive hearing loss with no clear diagnosis to offer doctors and caretakers guidance as to how to properly treat this seemingly rare excruciating painful condition.

Given the very urgent need and extreme pain, Karen has done everything in their power to find a diagnosis seeing multiple specialists at some of the top hospitals in the United States including Walter-Reed Medical Center, MedStar Georgetown University Hosptial, George Washington University Hospital frequently seeing multiple specialists from immunologists, rheumatologists, dermatologists to infectious disease specialists, and more on an almost daily basis.

Regrettably, despite the grave need for uniform, proactive treatment, Karen was recently consulted by a multi-disciplinary team to see very expensive and out-of-network research specialists such as those found at the Mayo Clinic Research in the hopes of finding treatments to mitigate the infections, myalgic encephalomyelitis or ME/CFS (formerly known as chronic fatigue) as well as provide Karen with needed relief of targeted care in the hopes of returning to the workforce and community.

All of the generous funds raised go towards this very daunting and extremely expensive task of traveling, surviving and acquiring medical care and diagnosis Karen so desperately requires not only to survive but thrive as they once have. Thank you so much for your compassionate donations as they mean life and death for Karen!