Help Restore a Destroyed Life

My friend NJ needs your help. She’s in urgent need of hip replacement surgery. I hope you will read her story and please help with what you can.

When NJ was 17, she was in an auto accident and broke her pelvis in several places. After decades NJ has developed a chronic mobility condition with increasing pain over the last several years. It’s now worsening every week and is taking NJs mobility, independence and her ability to work.

Like thousands of others, NJ and her spouse had no health insurance through their employer. Their challenging jobs took them out of state for months at a time. NJ’s mildly autistic adult son lived in their home, acting as caretaker during their deployments. With NJ’s hips becoming increasingly worse, the family planned funding for the hip replacement surgery that NJ needs to be mobile again, and stop the degeneration that is taking place. NJ has been diagnosed with avascular necrosis with advanced osteoarthritis. The damage being done every day is causing her leg bones to die. Coworkers have watched as each day became more difficult for her to come to work. Finally she could no longer manage the pain.

During a deployment in July of 2011, NJ endured the most horrible experience imaginable, the worst pain possible. NJ’s spouse returned from a deployment one week before NJ was to return. As he was leaving the airport shuttle NJ’s son stepped up to the shuttle door and shot him several times, killing him instantly. Unknowingly, NJ’s son had had a mental break. Months later his schizophrenia would be diagnosed. So very busy with the business of a widow and mother, she put her own health issue far down on the priority list.

Can you imagine your life being destroyed in less than 10 seconds? Your future gone and your past, having raised a decent son, torn apart by mental illness? A beloved spouse and friend brutally taken, and a son with such a severe mental illness his life will forever be a struggle toward some form of normalcy?

For the past 15 months, NJ has been through a hell that can’t be described. Her son’s fate remains unknown with NJ living in a kind of stasis and not physically capable of going to visit him. What NJ does know is that she is unimaginably alone, and her family will never return home to her.

She tried to deploy for work, but had to leave early, the pain too unbearable. NJ is unable to work and now nearly unable to care for herself. She has to use what little funds she has to pay for caregivers for anything other than simple tasks. NJ has had no income for months and is only a short time from losing the home that she shared with her family.

NJ desperately must have this surgery. She can’t provide for herself without the surgery, and has no way to raise the money herself because she can’t work until she has the surgery. Every month, she has become increasingly incapacitated.

The hospital requires a 20 percent down payment for the $68,000 rehabilitative surgery on one hip. That is $13,600. NJ is out of funds and will be unable to return to work until she has recuperated from the surgery. $13,600 is needed urgently as NJ becomes ever closer to losing her home – and becoming homeless. $13,600 is only the down payment. It will take a couple months to rehabilitate and even longer to find work, so NJ also needs some assistance to get by until she can return to work.

NJ is in constant and tremendous pain that grows worse every week. The man she loves deeply is gone, horrifically taken from her by her own son, and NJ is alone. NJ must have the surgery to stop the destruction that continues to destroy her legs and has now made her barely able to care for herself.

Please help NJ now. She needs to walk again so she can work to keep her home.