I don’t enjoy doing this sort of thing but…

I’ve started up the Allyn Is Sick! Fund to help us out while she’s in the hospital.

Allyn is my mother-in-law. She has had emphysema/COPD, heart disease and congestive heart failure for some years already. This past weekend, we noticed her health starting to go downhill.

She was diagnosed with pnuemonia in her upper left lung, and the doctors found a mass, also in her left lung, on the same x-ray. She is scheduled for an endoscopy procedure tomorrow that will tell the doctors exactly what this mass is. Although it’s not pretty to think about, there is a strong chance that it is cancer.

Due to all this, she’s in for a long haul in the hospital. We’re getting her a case manager and meeting with that person tomorrow to discuss prognosis, and the possibility of arranging hospice so we can bring her home.

This fund isn’t to pay the medical bills - she has coverage through MediCal and a supplementary insurance. I started up the fund to help us with the expenses:

- gas, for going back and forth from the hospital (averaging $15/day for the trips), fast food for us since we neither have the time nor the energy to cook, (and to be honest, we haven’t had anything to eat since, well, about Saturday, because of those reasons)

- new slippers for her because the ones she has have no tread on them and increase her risk of falling again, and in a perfect world:

- enough so that Allyn’s sister could come out and visit from Pennsylvania.

Of course there may be some other expenses that we haven’t anticipated, but we’re dealing with things as they come.

(I’d rather get pretty and go get hotdogs, but you know. Such is life.)

If you want to donate, local people know where to find me, or you can click the “donate” button which takes you to paypal, or just paypal to morta33@gmail.com.