Nadia Fern Capehart

I have been going back and forth about how to write this and what to say because asking for help really isn’t something I typically have in my toolbox, and if I’m being honest, that’s a big part of how I got here. For years, I’ve had a bad habit of recognizing that I’m struggling, but despite knowing both the mechanics and the operator (me) weren’t exactly in ideal working order, I believed I could outwork anything. Along the way, I lost sight of the fact that not everything can be solved by working harder. Hard work has never been my problem, but knowing when something can’t reasonably be overcome by effort alone has been. Each day is spent trying to make enough progress to cover today’s problems and yesterday’s without heading into tomorrow already behind, leaving almost no chance of ever getting ahead. That’s how I found myself in the same ditch I’ve been trying to climb out of for the last ten years—and how I almost made the same mistake with my health. Before I ever got sick, I was already buried under everything this year had thrown at me—losing my very best friend, my Nanny, being hospitalized after a hand injury, the catastrophic loss of my rescue guinea pigs, and spending more than a year fighting a severe flea infestation that ultimately made me sick enough to land in the hospital with a flea-borne illness called murine typhus. I spent five days trying to push through fevers over 102° before finally going to the ER, which turned into a 13-day hospitalization. The hospitalization alone resulted in a $59,584 inpatient bill and uncovered additional medical issues that will also require treatment, but more immediately, it left me facing months of recovery, ongoing appointments with expensive specialists, medications, and the reality that healing my brain and body requires the ability to step away from the constant weight of today’s bills, rent, utilities, and the many overdue responsibilities I was already carrying before I was admitted—including finally being able to pay for professional flea treatment instead of continuing to fight a battle I was never going to win one step at a time. I don’t have health insurance because I’ve always worked for myself and, until now, I’d honestly never been sick enough to think much about it. The typhus wasn’t the beginning of this story—it was simply the final straw. I haven’t written this sooner because I genuinely thought I’d wake up feeling like myself again, but that hasn’t happened. The urgent problem now is that recovering requires the very things I don’t allow for and can’t currently afford to give myself: physical and mental rest, proper nutrition, medications, vitamins, specialist follow-up, and the time to actually heal. Without those things, I’ll keep doing what I’ve always done—making decisions based on today’s emergencies, doing things that prolong my recovery, and continuing the same pattern that got me here in the first place. This experience made it painfully clear that if I don’t prioritize my health in every aspect, the next time could be much worse. So, for probably the first time in my life, I’m asking for help before I wait too long again. Instead of continuing the cycle, I want the chance to recover, rebuild the stability I really did once have, and become the person I want to be for others again.