A Fundraising Newsletter

Hi everyone,

For those who haven’t been following my latest “Chronic Illness” adventure, five days ago, my husband and I launched a personal fundraising page.

We never in our lives thought we would do something like this, but with the encouragement of friends and family, we decided to take a leap of faith.

If you’d like to read a little more of the background story, you can in this blog post:

I Never Imagined I Would Have To Do This

Every day since we launched the page, we have received the most generous of donations, encouraging messages of support and our page being shared by others in an effort to help us achieve our fundraising goals.

Today has been another amazingly overwhelming day of support from friends, acquaintances, colleagues, and beautiful strangers. Thank you so much again from the bottom of our hearts.

Being Transparent

I want to be transparent about how we are using the incredibly generous gifts. So here’s a little update so far:

Thanks to all of our supporters, we have raised $3700 as of today, 19th Sept. It’s just incredible!
We are $2300 away from our new reduced target of $6000. This is the amount that, along with a private ongoing fortnightly gift from some beautiful friends, will help us juggle our cash flow and supplement the fortnightly gap we experience every pension day due to excess medical expenses. Plus we need to pay off medical personal loans we have incurred along the way. It should help us for at least 12 to 24 months and possibly longer. As an ex banker I’m at least good at budgeting. 😊 I’ve kept us going for 10 years since medically retiring, but I guess all good things do come to an end.
After careful consideration, lots of discussion and consultation with my medical team, the consensus of opinion is it is better for us not to have the stress, both mental and physical, of buying/selling and moving to release equity in our home, especially given my disease activity and progression.
It has also become clear that we wouldn’t release enough equity, given our special disability housing needs, to make the move viable.
So ideally, we need to stay in our existing home until we need to move into Service Assisted Living retirement housing. That could happen within two years or five years, but it’s most likely going to happen. We definitely need to avoid two moves close together as one would cause serious impacts on our health, and a second move soon after would likely kill one or both of us!!
Given we are not moving the financial gifts will also give us a small emergency fund if appliances break down etc, which they do when you don’t have money to fix or replace them….it’s Murphy’s law isn’t it!!

So that’s the summary of where we are at with the fundraising target and use of the funds.

Please feel free to share this update with anyone you have shared our fundraising appeal with.

If you could encourage others to share our fundraising page we would so appreciate it. Here’s the link:

“You can be sure that God will take care of everything you need, his generosity exceeding even yours in the glory that pours from Jesus.”
(Philippians 4:19, MSG).

Thank you again so much from the bottom of our hearts. You are all amazing and such a blessing.

Talk soon

Lots of love

Sam and Peter xx

Medical Musings with Friends

If you’re looking for genuine support, care, understanding and friendship, you are so welcome to join my closed Facebook support forum, Medical Musings with Friends . It’s a safe place to connect with others living with chronic and complex diseases, who truly understand the daily challenges. A warm welcome awaits.