I’m currently unemployed and bringing in no income (I’m stay at home for the kids, since we can’t afford child care). My wife is our sole breadwinner. She earns about $60,000 a year, which isn’t bad, but it’s less than $40k after we pay for health insurance and taxes. We own a house and support four people on that income. And seriously, honestly, it’s not undoable, and we were doing fine keeping our heads above water until recently.
What changed?
With everything else going on I haven’t talked about it much, but the nugget – our 3 month old son – has a mystery allergy, or possibly a mystery health problem. So far, he’s hitting his physical and mental developmental milestones, but we can’t figure out what the problem is. His skin is continually broken out in hives, he produces bloody stools, and his breathing is perpetually wheezy. Regular appointments with the doctor, various changes to his daily routine, and dietary changes have helped the problems but haven’t cured them. It’s added both work and daily expense that we happily cover to the best our ability, but it’s absolutely made things harder.
He’s taking neocate, a fancy hypoallergenic formula that costs roughly three times more than regular formula. I’m not able to breastfeed (thanks, PCOS), and our insurance company has declined our requests for financial support to pay for the formula because he’s not actively dying (not exaggerating, that’s their literal reason). Instead of spending maybe $100 on formula each month, we’re spending three times that, and it will only increase as he grows. Even with fancy food, he’s edging dangerously into “failure to thrive” territory. He was born small – around 15th percentile for boys – and though he’s been gaining weight, it’s not at the rate he should be. Three weeks ago, he was in the 4th percentile for weight, and on Friday at his most recent appointment he was in the first percentile (he’s been pretty steady at the 25th percentile for height). Further, we thought he was doing better but then he had more bloody discharge this Saturday, so that means back to the doctor. We’ll have to afford the $300 plus each month most likely until he’s at least 9 months or a year old, and probably won’t be able to switch him to milk – until we identify the allergy we can’t even guess how much this will cost going forward. The price of this more than exceeds the wiggle room in our monthly budget, especially since we’re also paying extra doctor co-pays, extra washing prices for fancy detergent, and slathering him in expensive lotion to protect his skin.
As such, hi, I’m here asking for help. I’m keeping things really simple. If you want to chip in a little, you can:
I’ll try to write commissions of 1k or fewer words for anyone who buys me a ko-fi or supports me on Patreon, but I can’t promise when they’ll get done. Time is limited, and I get little enough time to write that it’s even harder for me to get done writing “responsibilities” than it used to be, and honestly? It was never my strong point. People who’ve commissioned me can attest, I’m really unreliable, and I feel like shit about that but there we are – I learned the hard way that’s how I am and now all I can do is try to be honest and straightforward about it, and ask that people support me despite that short-coming. What I can promise – I’m doing my best to continue producing stories and other content. That won’t change. And financial support in this would really alleviate stress for my wife and I, which would make it easier for me to get writing and such done, so indirectly, ya’ll will benefit.
Thanks for reading, everybody. Here, have a picture of my happy wiggly boy.
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