Pay-what-you-want emergency hospital commissions are open to raise money for my father’s Leukemia treatment and chemotherapy.
He was diagnosed on the 18th of May after walking two blocks to the ER with my mom’s help, being in such a delirious state that he could not drive himself and being too close for an ambulance to be necessary. He was in a state of shock for hours and the ER team determined from his blood work that he had some kind of Leukemia.
My father and I were air lifted two hours south to the Pittsburgh UPMC Shadyside cancer hospital where a full body CT scan revealed his spleen enlarged and ruptured, and he was bleeding out internally. He endured 3 surgeries and 1 non-invasive procedure in order to remove the spleen and subsequently attempt to stop the internal bleeding he suffered due to the Leukemia’s effect of weakening his immune system and making his blood unable to clot. Every time the procedures failed, he had 4 quarts of blood removed from his abdominal cavity. He would have died if the surgeon hadn’t managed to stop the bleeding, using an emergency trauma technique of using clotting agent and packing the cavity with sterile cloths.
I’ve been living and sleeping in the waiting room just outside the ICU for a week now, with no plans of leaving any time soon. Not without my dad. We will likely be here for weeks, maybe months.
I’m raising money to help pay for whatever his insurance doesn’t cover, as well as any expenses after his GE benefits expire. (GE transportation is moving from our city to Texas, and as a result my dad just retired earlier this year.) He’s only 62 years old and otherwise, at least before the Leukemia war triggered, very healthy.
So if you would like to help out, sharing this around would be great, or getting a commission (commissions@vickorano.com) or donating to my PayPal (VickoRano@live.com) because every cent I make from my work from now on will go straight to my dad’s treatment and recovery. And also maybe some food for me.
Thanks so much. Let’s get him through this, so he can live out a normal happy and healthy life. 💖🙆🐥😴
