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I Am 30 Years Old

I am thirty years old.  Three months ago, I was settling into the house my fiancé and I bought last year. I was celebrating my engagement, planning a fall wedding, and thinking about starting a family soon. After eight years of working for another agency, I was also really happy to be out on my own, setting up a nonprofit to provide services to people with developmental, physical, and intellectual disabilities. My nonprofit, Community Navigators, was about to be approved by the State of Connecticut. 

Then I was diagnosed with breast cancer. I had a double mastectomy this month. When I developed some new pain, I went to the emergency room. They found that the cancer had already spread.

I would still like to run my nonprofit, provide services to others, be married and have children. But now I have to change my plans. I am starting treatment immediately.  I’m not going to have time to freeze any eggs or embryos first and for now I can’t really think about having children.  Maybe later. My fiancé and I are planning a much smaller wedding in May. And I am going to do all I can to stay healthy during my chemotherapy and hormone treatments so that I can eventually get back to my job.

The problem is that this could not have come at a worse time for me financially. Both my fiancé and I are self-employed. If I can’t work for a few weeks, I’ll have no income.  And when he’s taking care of me, he can’t work as much either.  We have health insurance like we’re supposed to, but our deductibles are high ($5000) and my own out-of-pocket maximum this year is $6,850. I’ve learned that I may have to go out-of-network for the specialty care and consultations I need, and those bills will add thousands more to our out-of-pocket costs.  And we still have a mortgage and other bills to pay.

We are economizing as best we can.  Our families and many friends are also helping us out.  But the healthcare bills we have right now still have to be paid, and somehow we need to get the money to pay those bills and more to come over the next weeks and months.

So, as difficult as this is, we are asking our friends and their friends for help. We will never forget to pay it forward in the future when our friends and their friends need help from us.

by Larissa Gionfriddo Podermanski

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