Wife Needs Surgery - Battle for the Box
This is Lana. She is my wife and best friend for over 18 years.
She used to be an award winning photographer, yoga teacher, and project manager for a telecom corporation. She was actively involved in our community, helping cancer survivors with physical rehab and improving the lives of everyone she could. She certainly improved mine.
She was my partner in crime, my urban exploration adventure buddy, and my companion in art. 
That was until 2016 when she woke up one day vomiting and in agonizing pain, and it hasn’t stopped in 3 years. She lost 40 lbs, rarely can eat, had to stop working, and is now disabled. She went from running a triathlon to being bed ridden.
Lana suffers from something called Stage 4 Endometriosis. Like anything else associated with the words “Stage Four,” it is rather dire. Women get to stage 4 when the disease is not treated, or is treated poorly. It took Lana 12 years to get a diagnosis, and 15 additional years (and counting) to get corrective surgery. She had two botched surgeries from a surgeon unskilled in treating endometriosis back in 2004 and 2005. Yes, she has had pelvic pain all her life, but she willed herself through the pain every day, until she couldn’t anymore in 2016.
While there is no cure for endometriosis, there is treatment. That treatment can only be done by a highly skilled surgeon who can remove the endometriosis from all her organs. Canada has very few surgeons with the surgical excision techniques needed to treat Stage 4 endometriosis, and their recommendation is either experimental cancer drugs, or installing a pain modulation box in her spine that shuts off the pain. That’s ridiculous. She has exhausted all specialists in Ontario.
In Atlanta, GA The Centre for Endometriosis Care has performed the surgery Lana needs on 6,000+ global patients from more than 50 countries. The success rate is jaw dropping, and women declare themselves pain-free for the first time in their lives. We are raising this money to go there. www.centerforendo.com
The following procedures will need to be done:
-Full excision of all endometrial implants from bladder, bowel, abdominal cavity, and pedundal nerve. Some bowel may need to be resected as a result.
-Thoracic surgery to remove tissue from diaphragm and catamenial nerve.
-Complete Hysterectomy
Lana petitioned the provincial health insurance program (OHIP) for funding for the surgery in Atlanta, and is currently awaiting for a decision. That decision could take upwards of several years, and their track record with cases like this is to deny funding. Hence this gofundme.
Also, OHIP made policy changes effective Jan 2020 that prevents someone like Lana to seek care in other Canadian provinces. Even if there are skilled surgeons elsewhere in Canada, she would still have to raise money to see them because OHIP no longer covers intra-province care.
When Lana gets this surgery, she will be able to get out of bed, leave the house, and go back to living life. It’s not a cure, but CEC’s success rate is so high that it would be stupid not to pursue it.
Lana promised herself that when she gets this surgery, she will come back to Canada as an advocate for endometriosis sufferers. Canada lags behind the rest of the world with endometriosis treatment; favouring harmful pharmaceutical treatments funded by drug corporations instead of adopting modern surgical techniques. She has already started advocating by petitioning the Minister of Health to recognize endometriosis as a national health crisis similar to what UK and Australia have done recently.
Help me by donating for her surgery, and joining the fight to bring Endometriosis Awareness to the international stage. If you have a wife, a daughter, just someone you love, and they complain about pelvic pain, have days where they can’t get out of bed, don’t dismiss it. It may not just be “that time of the month” or “in her head.” Please take it seriously. Lana wasn’t taken seriously and now this is the result.