helping a sick mom and her family
Fundraising campaign by
amanda smith
-
US$0.00Donated So Far
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I'm Manda, a 36 year old mother of one stuck in the hell known as South Texas. I'm disabled, primarily physically, and just found a couple of months ago I'm pregnant after being told 16 years ago that my daughter would be my only pregnancy. I'm married to a hardworking man and have this awesome 15 year old daughter.
But as I truly believe I am the Truman in God's personal "Truman Show", things never seem to work as planned.
The doctor I'm seeing for my high risk pregnancy is pushing for me to have an abortion, despite the fetus being fine and the fact I'm over 27 weeks pregnant. He's started blackballing me from finding a new doctor and my Medicare won't cover a single thing. My own bishop encouraged abortion not for health reasons but because I'd strayed from the flock, so to speak.
Why not apply for state or government assistance you ask? Well, apparently I worked way too hard when I was well to get any real help. It's always good to know that raising your 10 brothers and sisters from the age of 8, getting a full-time job a you were 12, filing taxes every single year on time, refusing state aid or paying it back in full with regard to my first pregnancy, and working until I literally couldn't anymore because I was vomiting blood at my desk was appreciated by my government. To get sole custody of my daughter from my ex, who beat me nonstop but shook her until she seized while she was already on a heart monitor the one time the court said I had to give him visitation without my presence, I agreed to no child support or state aid plus would pay back every single dime in help we got. I lived in my car to pay this off and cover surgeries my child needed.
For being a high school dropout who worked her way into a job making good money a year legitimately, I thought I was doing a damn good job taking care of our situation without becoming a statistic. That hard work was paid back in the Dept. of Health and Human Services blowing me off. We get less than 20 dollars a month in food stamps to feed 3 people. I can't get Medicaid because I have Medicare and I can't get rid of Medicare without waiting another 2 years to get it back after the baby is born. None of my medications are covered, with the cheapest being $68.00 a month. The system I paid into for decades abandoned me and I was told if I'd never had a job, I'd have been better off getting government help.
My husband is trying to find work and does odd jobs to get us enough food to barely get by. For those unaware how the state of Texas penal system works, a case against you that you receive at the age of 17 will haunt you for 15 years. If you can't pay 200 dollars a month on outrageous fines that don't match the crime committed, they add more interest until you have to either rob a bank to pay them or just sit your time out. He was busted with a drug used by medicine men in his tribe (peyote) but was charged like he was a wannabe Pablo Esobar. He was given probation. But every single time he didn't have quite enough money to pay off the remainder of the balance at the end of his probation period, more time on probation plus more fees with interest added. He decided to serve his time out and that has made finding a job damn near impossible despite how old the conviction is and what it was for.
I had complications from a botched surgery almost 11 years ago. A number of my friends who had the surgery died and the surgeon skipped town after crying to the media how hard it was to lose patients, despite the fact he's the reason they died. From vomiting up to 16 times a day, all my teeth have rotted out. They are so bad that it's damaging my heart. I've had to have repair surgeries to my digestive track where sections of my small intestine were removed because they were literally rotting inside me. More repair work caused me to have the first of 3 strokes. I've been put in hospice care more than once and abandoned by most of my family during this time so my then 12 year old child provided my care. I refused to accept this whole dying thing and worked hard with new doctors who slowly had me getting my strength back. I am now no longer on the hospice list but still very ill.
I am supposed to stay on 100% bed rest but that's hard to do when your family is struggling to put food on the table. My husband stepped up to the plate in the past 2 1/2 years we've been married. He's been an amazing father to a teenager that that isn't biologically his and she loves him just as much as he loves her. Most of our family members have abandoned us because I won't give them the pain medication I take nor will I let anyone treat our little family like we're nothing but trash. We've pawned every single thing we have and my child didn't get Christmas for the 2nd year in a row because we had to put food on the table.
I've always believed that there is good in people despite the world trying its hardest to prove me wrong many times. I've been a foster mom 21 times and helped raise my siblings from the time I was 8 years old on. (There was nothing wrong with my mother physically; she just realized she had a live-in nanny/cook/maid/thing to abuse in her oldest daughter) We take in homeless people when we have room, try to make sure every person in the small complex we live in has food to eat every single night, help our neighbors who can not read with all their bills/paperwork, find clothes for the vets around here suffering from social anxiety, and help these people who normally have no family at all feel like they have one in us.
I'm writing this because we need help and I had to swallow my pride to ask for it. I desperately need medication filled for the baby and for medication needed to keep my grand mal seizures (aka epilepsy from hell) under control. I need dental surgery to remove the jagged edges that are left so I can try to undo some of the damage to my heart. We need groceries to feed our family plus the foster kid living here right now. We need help for the doctor bills that aren't covered and so we can afford to drive even further away to find a new obstetrician/gynecologist that will accept a patient like me. The place we kept most of our things burned down this summer and our apartment was robbed less than 2 weeks ago, so we need to replace the things burned down like tennis shoes and stuff like pots and pans. Someone even took our plates that had no value beyond sentimental. Cleaning supplies, laundry soap, change to do laundry, our dog food, our mop, and our emergency cell phone are all things MIA. Hell, they cleaned out the freezer of what meat and food we had in what I can only imagine was a hint that my pregnant butt needs to lose weight.
Any help at all would be appreciated and we will work nonstop to pay anyone who donates to us back as soon as we can.
While I may feel at times like just giving up on everything, like I did earlier tonight, I realize I have to still be alive for some reason. Sometimes I feel like that reason is just irritate the surgeon who nearly killed me. Other days, I think the reason is just to be the star of "The Manda Show" which is just like "The Truman Show". The main difference is the show is just for God, or the diety of your choice, to throw me into situations that wouldn't happen to a person in the worst Lifetime movie ever made just to see how I react.
Thanks for reading this -
Manda
Organizer
- amanda smith
- Rockport, US
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