Today I am sponsoring a great woman by the name of Jennifer Roeling. Here is a picture of her and her cute family.
She is the cousin of a very good friend of mine and she needs our help. I have been in contact with her, and she has emailed me her story. So I'm going to go ahead and post what she has written....
"I'm 36 years old. I'm happily married to my husband Richard, we'll be married 8 years this year. We have 3 beautiful kids, 2 girls and 1 boy...Lindsay is 15, Landen is 8 & Taylor is 6. I'm a stay at home Mom and my husband is a hard working man for all of us. I've dealt with a lot of medical problems and chronic pain after my last baby. It's always been one thing after another I feel like I never get a break from pain issues. It's hard dealing with so much pain and trying to take care of my kids, so I've had to have so much help with kids the last couple years. It's one of my struggles as a mother. I hope they grow up knowing I did everything I could for them and still try everyday, I hope they know how much I love them and pray everyday that I can be a fun active mom for them and take care of them by myself like I use to.. My biggest struggle of all is not being a normal mom everyday. <3
About 4 years ago I started experiencing knee pain in both knees, my left knee has always been worse then my right. I went and saw a few Doctor's for this pain they have done so many X-Rays and I always got the same answer, that they didn't see anything wrong and they just wanted me to do to physical therapy. I did what they wanted me to and it never helped. There's been so many times that I've fallen down because my knees would get week, there's been so many times that I couldn't walk on my own, if I would hold my kids it made me so week in the knees and felt like they were going to collapse on me. I couldn't understand why the Doctor's I would see didn't know what was wrong with my knees. I decided to talk to my new Doctor that is my pain management Doctor for my chronic pain. I told him how bad my left knee was and I haven't had answers for years. He decided to do an MRI, something that none of the other Dr's did. In November 2014, I got my follow up after the MRI on my left knee, I thought it was going to be like all the other results I've gotten, but nope it wasn't. I found out that my femur bone was dying/deteriorating because of bad blood flow. It was the worst day of my life I was so devastated, I cried & my husband cried. My family and my best friend also cried and had a hard time with the news. My Dr sent me to see a bone specialist and she told us that I have AVN-Avasculiar Necrosis it means I don't have blood flow at all in the femur bone, and it's caused by smoking. I also found out that the issues with my femur bone is not connected to my knee pain and we still don't know what's causing the knee pain. Which is really frustrating not knowing what's going on. We still had to run a bunch of tests. It's scary that AVN has no symptoms. If it wasn't for my knee pain I would have never known about the AVN, or that I needed to quit smoking.
In February I found out the hard way that I couldn't walk on my own because my knee were hurting so bad. So I called my pain Dr to get me in as an urgent visit and they got me in the next day and he wanted to repeat the MRI on my left knee to see if the AVN has progressed at all. He also wanted to do an MRI on the right knee. I got in right away and back to my Drs 3 days later. He told me that the left femur bone has progressed rather quickly. When I first found out about my femur bone on the left the AVN was at 7.4% and now it's already at a 8.8% and that I also have AVN in the right femur bone. The Dr told me that we need to do a Stem Cell Implant, which is a bone marrow transplant. They'll take bone marrow from my hip and put it in my femur bones to get the blood circulating again so they'll stop dying off. If it reaches my knee joint I can lose my legs so it needs to be done asap. This procedure is not covered by any health insurance and all together it'll cost $10,100.00. To hear that was heart breaking and it scared me to death. My depression got worse, and my husband also got really depressed. The next challenge was quitting smoking and It's been the hardest thing I've ever done. It's been a huge challenge in my life. Ever since we found out how bad it is we've been trying every way we can to raise money. I posted about having a fundraiser yard sale and I was amazed by how many people stopped by to donate stuff for my yard sale and it was a great success. I'm so very blessed to have so many people in my life that want to help me. Its all been a huge challenge for me, but I'm hopeful and trying my best to stay positive."
Jennifer also want's her story to be about smoking awareness. She encourages everyone who is currently smoking, to seek help for their addiction.
Jennfer has an account set up through Cypress Credit Union that you can donate to, just go in and tell them you want to donate to the "donate to Jennifer Roeling" fund. Also she has a go fund me account, the link for that is here.
If there is any way you would be able to donate at all to help save Jennifer's legs, it really would be a huge blessing. Even a few dollars is better than nothing. Little amounts can add up fast.
Thank you for taking the time to read Jennifer's story! I hope everyone has a great weekend!!
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