Stroke Rehab Support for Frankie

As some of you know, in 2014 I suffered, as a "rare side effect" from my chemotherapy, a debilitating and nearly fatal stroke. My whole life trajectory was ripped into shreds. Two+ years later, I am back in the Bay Area still picking up the pieces. 
In my time at college from September 2015 to march 2016, I had been forcing myself to gut out six months of repeated disappointment and unhappiness. Balancing chemotherapy, full-time studies and a newly-acquired physical handicap without an adequate outlet like sports or the social dynamic I had known and thrived in for 18 years was an insane mission. Engrossing myself in school was merely a distraction from my reality, a band-aid over the wounds I still carry. The frustrations of my attempt to continue life after a disastrous trauma were like salt in those wounds every time I cursed myself and  my clumsy, useless body, compounding my self-loathing. 
I could be the most educated but dependent man in the world, but I'd rather live the life where I can handle the activities of daily life and be self sufficient. I have every intention to finish my BA and more when I can walk with no leg or arm brace and use both hands for more and more advanced tasks.
But the iron is hot, and I need to strike now. I spent twenty weeks in Santa Barbara trying to make it work or just be tough enough to hold on to the next break, but that's not the minset I want to have when earning my degree at college.
My brain is young and malleable. I came back to the Bay with the intention to go all-in with rehab and achieve the fullest recovery possible. Function has been returning and will continue to do so if I put in the hours at rehab. Eventually, I want to be able to play with my kids, maybe teach them how to shoot a basketball and tie their own shoes. Just like I learned, and then learned again. 
  Before starting at the private clinic I now receive my treatment at, hospitals insisted I'd progressed past the point they can help patients get to. Pathetically, for an affliction that kills or handicaps 800,000 Americans every year, the standard of care for stroke is a complete joke. To 'rehabilitate' means to restore to its former condition. Hospitals have become experts at teaching often counter-productive, harmful compensation strategies that are ultimately not facilitating any return of function
 until they flat out give up on patients, discharging them from care to live out the rest of their lives in a decrepit, handicapped state. There was a time when I, following instructions from my therapists, kept my left hand locked in a vice grip on the end of the sling that I was instructed to wear to keep the tendons in my left shoulder  from being stretched out further by the pull of gravity. How can a hand that is constantly closed ever regain the function to open and work in conjunction with other body parts? The only method of treatment that hospitals offer the patient is a home NMES(neuromuscular electrical stimulator) unit. After attaching electrodes to the muscle bellies of the arm, I would turn the unit on and zap myself with electric pulses to practice grasping and releasing small pill bottles. Supposedly, doing this for hours would eventually improve function in my hand. Let's recap– an electric current originating from a 9 volt battery pulsing into my arm and illiciting a violent closing of my fist over and over again was the best that any hospital could tell me to do. Somehow, this would lead to my regaining the ability to send purposeful controlled signals from my brain  to my hand and carry out high level function of my hand again and be able to independently carry out such functions as  typing, softly rolling a basketball off my fingertips for two points or swiping then releasing a credit card as I put it back in my wallet.  
On to the lower extremity:
In 2015, after the life threatening hurdles were cleared and my skull was back in my head, I was walking around in a carbon fiber orthotic prescribed to me by my therapists. My knee would hyper extend frequently, I would hike and circumduct my leg and with puzzling and previously(to my stroke) nonexistent frequency, my toes were constantly ingrown and infected. Every other week, I was discovering a freshly infected nail on my feet. All the while, my walking form was slowly doing structural damage to my affected leg by only recruiting the strongest, least-likely-to-fail muscles to hobble me from point A to point B.  Thisinfection problem got so bad that I went to a podiatrist to have the procedure done to remove a portion of the toenail and eliminate the possibility of later recurrent infection. As it turned out, the toes of my left foot were curling with every step I took and causing these infections. Never once in a hospital was my foot taken out of my shoe or stretched. After starting to work at this clinic, my foot is much looser, my leg brace inhibits toes from curling, and I have not had another toe infection. Concurrently, muscles are restregthened and coordination is trained to fire multiple muscles at the same time. The human foot and ankle have more than 100 muscles, tendons and ligaments that allow them to function properly. 

These two falacies of stroke treatment in hospitals are just a few of hundreds, even thousands of flawed and ultimately unhelpful techniques.
Those who have been around me the most can affirm the marked improvement  in the steadiness and normalization of my walking, more movement of my left arm and an overall return of vitality and the true Frankie Comey.

This clinic and my rehab is the major driving force behind my healing and steady recovery of function over this last year of 2016. 
Unfortunately, 
insurance has stopped reimbursing my parents months ago, refusing the legitimacy of medical necessity for these funds. My stroke rehab is costing hundreds of dollars an hour, and I am asking that you, my friends, invest in my future and help me in my time of need to get through this rebuilding phase and keep forging ahead in life.

ATTN:
If you would like to give directly to work around GoFundMe's 8% cut, please contact me directly on social media or here on GoFundMe via message

I've added mom, Judith Huang as a beneficiary. Being my mom, she's obviously very involved in my healing journey.