We're in the fight of our lives in 2023

Hi, my name is Lew Cohn and I'm the publisher of the Gonzales Inquirer, the oldest continuously published weekly newspaper in Texas. The love of my life, my best friend and my soulmate is my wife Betty Cohn and she has the heart of a champion. She has been fighting for her life, all her life, and this year has been one of the toughest she has ever faced.

For those who don't know, Betty was the victim of a botched gastric bypass surgery by a quack doctor in Houston some 22 years ago. Instead of performing the Roux-en-Y bypass he was supposed to do, Dr. Ramesh Srundgaram sliced off half her liver and then placed a metal clamp on her stomach and sewed her up like that. The damage was not discovered until seven years later when she nearly died because the clamp necrotized her stomach and forced a team of surgeons to save her life by performing emergency surgery that she nearly did not survive. She has no stomach and is missing most of her small intestine and a part of her esophagus. She has a stoma in which she can "eat" food but she gets hardly any absorption of critical nutrients. But hey, she's lucky, right, because this guy killed 22 other patients, went to prison, got out, practiced medicine without a license in another state and then fled the country to avoid further penalty. She escaped with her life ... essentially receiving a "life sentence" of pain and hardship.

Because she cannot absorb vitamins and minerals the same way an unmaimed person can, her bones have deteriorated and failed her and cost her a nursing career at which she worked so hard to succeed.

She had to have a knee replaced at age 48 in 2016 and then her right hip replaced in 2020 during the height of COVID-19, for which to prove she was serious about the need for the surgery, she had to have every last remaining tooth pulled from her mouth to prevent a major source of possible infection.

In 2018, she was suffering from severe pneumonia but was misdiagnosed by a medical practitioner who kept telling her she was just depressed and anxious because her mom had died a short time earlier. It took her coughing up bits of lung before someone took her seriously enough and she had to then have five layers of her left lung scaled back (a process called decortication). We nearly lost her then. She was in ICU for three weeks, including being on a ventilator following surgery for nearly a day. Thankfully, she was able to mostly recover from this.

Earlier this year, in late January (early February) we had to move to a hotel after experiencing a problem in our rental home in Gonzales. While at the hotel, Betty fell unexpectedly and seriously injured her hip with the transplant. Again, medical professionals failed us and misdiagnosed it at a small town hospital (I won't name which one here due to potential legal action) and told her it was just bruises and contusions and to walk around on it. When things did not improve and we finally got an orthopedist to see her in Bastrop in March (seven weeks later), he sent us instantly to an Austin hospital to see a trauma surgeon because her right hip was broken below the implant. She had to undergo an excruciating procedure to have it rebuilt and a new prosthesis put in, along with a rod in her leg and cadaver bone to help hold things in place. She spent three weeks in the hospital and another three weeks at a rehab center before being released. She was making progress but still struggling with some activities and doctors told us it could be a year and a half before she really got back to being her "normal" self again.

I had moved Betty to Houston to be closer to our boys so they could help keep an eye on her while I super commute to Gonzales half a week and spend weekends with her. We thought we were about to turn a corner when she started running super high fever (103 degrees plus) and was extremely sick with nausea, chills, vomiting and sweating. I had to call an ambulance to take her to HCA Houston Northwest, where they informed us she had an abscess on her hip that has apparently gotten into the bone and possibly to the implant. She had to have emergency surgery to cut out a lot of tissue (lavage and debridement) and now has a big open wound sealed with a wound vac and has been receiving IV antibiotics since the night of Sept. 18. She will finally get to be released soon from the hospital, but will have to have IV antibiotics for 12 weeks along with wound vac care before the doctors will consider closing up the wound on her leg so they can be certain all infection is killed and removed. She will have to go to an outpatient facility three times a week for wound care and get IV pushes every day.

The infection may have come from a UTI or some other infection that made its way through the bloodstream and down to her hip. It is staph and is very nasty and could have killed her had we not gone when we did to the hospital.

We think we may have a home that we can rent in Gonzales if things work out and I will be bringing her back to the community so I can continue to do my work at the paper, but to say we are struggling is the understatement of a lifetime. My salary and her disability only go so far and I've had to basically pay for lodging in two cities plus spend money for travel and food. We also had to put down one of our precious kitties, Frisky, this year after she developed a very aggressive cancer that was too late to help her overcome.

I also got us a car, only to have an accident which caused damage to it, followed by some catastrophic engine failure that happened as I was trying to deliver papers just a few weeks ago and days before Betty had to go to the hospital. It sometimes feels like if it weren't for bad luck, we'd have no luck at all these days.

A friend in the community — GISD Superintendent Dr. Elmer Avellaneda — suggested that I set up this GoFundMe when I saw him at the football game in Gonzales on Sept. 22. I don't typically like to ask other people for help. I hate sharing my burdens with others because I feel like I'm letting people down. But this time, I know he's right and I have to bite the bullet and ask for any help we can get. I am ashamed to do so, but I am more afraid of failing to act.

Any money received will be used to pay for getting Betty's treatments done, paying for getting our home up and running back in Gonzales (setting up utilities, rent and deposits) and paying to fix up or, if necessary, replace our car so we can have reliable transportation to safely transport her. I put a large amount because all of this is extremely costly and we have exhausted any and all savings we had, including liquidating a 401K from another job, in order just to be able to make it the past eight months.

Thank you in advance if you feel compelled to help out and thank you just for taking the time to read this if you did. May God bless each and every one of you.