Medical Expenses for Erin

Hi there, my name is Erin Cook and I am 30 years old. It's hard to know where to really start but I suppose the beginning is the best place to start.

Towards the end of my 6th grade year in elementary school I was diagnosed with Type 1 Diabetes. At the time, I was 9 years old and involved in a lot of sports. I was drinking tons of water and loosing weight. Initially my mom thought that this was normal as I was a growing kid and so active. This went on for a few months and in abundance of caution my mom decided to take me to my pediatrician. The appointment was right before my championship game at the boy's and girl's club so I had my uniform on. The nurse came in and took my blood sugar and said that she would return with the doctor. At that very moment I was blissfully unaware of what was going on, so I wasn't nervous. The doctor came in with a face that you don't want to see on your doctors face. She looked at my mom and I and said, "You are going straight to the hospital. You have diabetes."

When we arrived at the hospital it hit me that my life changed and would never be the same. I stayed for a week at CHOC (Children's Hospital of Orange County) and they taught my parent's and I about everything there was to know about Type 1 Diabetes.

I did pretty well at taking care of my diabetes for the first couple years, however as I got older and went through all the other stuff teenagers go through, I started to struggle. When I graduated from high school and went off to college I was 17 years old. For the first time in my life I was alone and didn't have my parents to constantly get after me to take care of my diabetes. While I enjoyed the independence and grew up into an "adult", at this point I was really struggling. I was suffering from diabetic burn-out and diabulemia. Diabulemia is not something that is talk about often, in fact I didn't even know there was a medical term for until a couple years ago. In short, diabulemia is when you stop or restrict your insulin use so that your body can go into a ketosis state to burn fat. Your blood sugar runs high, all the while causing damage to your body. I did not have any horrible immediate effects and I was desperate to stay skinny so I continued on. Little did I know that all the repeated microscopic damage that had been done to my body over the years, was starting to catch up with me.

It started with neuropathy in my feet, then I started having vision problems and got diagnosed with Diabetic Retinopathy. Shortly after I started having really severe stom problems and was diagnosed with gastroparesis. This became a really big wake up call for me, so I got myself together and started to do the best I could to take care of myself. The irony in this is that after I started taking better care of my health, the worse my health seemed to get. I was constantly in and out of the hospital and throwing up nearly everyday and struggling to keep anything down. I tried different diets, eliminating certain foods, eating smaller meals more frequently, and nothing seem to help.

Fast forward to the end of 2019 and I was just so sick all the time and had missed some much work because of it. I finally decided that I could work no longer in December of 2019. As if my body just gave out after that, I ended up in the hospital repeatedly for weeks at a time because my kidneys were barely holding on. My nephrologist did his best to keep me off of dialysis as long as he could but I finally went into complete kidney failure in February 2020 and started dialysis in March 2020.

Currently, I am on the waiting list for a duel organ transplant for a kidney and pancreas. As you can imagine I have always had a lot of medical debt through out the years being diabetic with all of the supplies, medication, doctor's visits, and hospital stays but since starting dialysis and having to quit my job the debt has become crippling.

I rarely ask for help because I like to be independent and do for myself but it's come to the point where I've realized I am going to have to ask for help.

I appreciate the support.

Thank you from the bottom of my heart.