The Independence of Racine's "Honorary Survivor" Threatened

We have the great pleasure to introduce you to an amazing and caring person - Lilly Nielsson. She inspires everyone she touches with her joy and strength, prompts Facebook posts like this on a daily basis:

Lilly has been tested by an auto accident that paralyzed her from the chest down and led to her divorce, and tested by getting ovarian cancer led to the removal of her gall balder. All of this she has recovered from and faces life with openness and optimism, but when her van, which is absolutely necessary to support herself, was totaled through no fault of Lilly, she was really set back and needs your help to continue living independently.

Lilly’s van was totaled when she went for a visit to her doctor at Froedtert Pleasant Prairie Hospital. After Lilly exited her van for her appointment, instead of driving her van to a parking location, the hospital staff accelerated Lilly’s van and literally crashed her van through an external wall of the hospital – totaling Lilly’s van.

TMJ4 of Milwaukee covered this story, highlighting the injustice of Lilly's situation and asking people to participate in this GoFundMe.

We created this GoFundMe page to help Lilly where she can not help herself. Lilly loves her career cutting and styling hair, and working as a color expert, and one of her great joys was when she became strong enough to start doing hair again. While doing people’s hair enables Lilly to cover some of her monthly expenses, the heavy costs of medical care and in-home care make it impossible for her to also shoulder the exceptional expenses of purchasing a new van. We all know that vans are not cheap transportation, but we never realized that adding a wheelchair ramp for access, lowering the van floor, and replacing the driver’s chair with clamps that hold her wheelchair in place, would cost as much as the van itself – but it does.

Lilly is such a force of love (the ‘Lilly Monster’, as she calls herself) that a garage occasionally does repairs on her aging van for free, but this can only go so far - and fixing a totaled van is 'too far'. Unless Lilly can get funding to purchase a new van, she will have to give up everything she has worked for and gained. Since this is too awful for words, we have set-up this GoFundMe page to help Lilly.

Please do not feel that any amount of money is too small. Really. Even $5 is great. Of course, if you feel moved to give more, that would be amazing. With your help, we will pass the goal together.

And here is where some of you, like the audience of TMJ4 News, can help even more – with work.

Even though she was a master who not only cut people’s hair with exceptional skill but taught many others, many of Lilly’s long-term clients felt stigmatized by having their hair cut by someone in a wheelchair and never came back. So, if you would like to both get the best cut of your life and help Lilly help herself, and if you can drive to Libertyville, IL, let us know and we’ll put you in contact with each other. Our whole family gets our hair cut by Lilly every few weeks, so we might even meet each other.

Thank you.