Brain Surgery Costs & Living Expenses for ANDII

Hi, there! For those who don't know me, my name is Andii Heath. I'm a Milwaukee-area musician with Neurofibromatosis II. Simply put, I don't have a fancy tumor suppressor gene that most folks have, so this means my body likes to grow benign tumors along the nerves throughout my body. I have some peppered a little bit of everywhere, including on my left sciatic nerve, my left shoulder, and some small ones on my spinal cord and brain.

This obviously sucks for, well, lots of reasons, but as a musician, the biggest tragedy of this disorder for me has been my bilateral acoustic neuromas. These are brain tumors on the auditory nerves in my brain; tumors that will eventually rob me of my hearing altogether.

Unfortunately, there's very little that can be done for these tumors other than resection, i.e. brain surgery. I was hoping to put that off for a nice long while, but my left AN unexpectedly grew quite a bit over the last two years, and now doctors are concerned about the effect it may have on my facial and balance nerves, which are nestled right next to the acoustic nerve. So, alas, it is time.

Costs for the surgery (called a retromastoid craniotomy) and hospital stay are going to depend on how the hospital submits the charges to Medicare after the fact, but I can likely expect to pay 20% of those fees if they're submitted under Part B. Based on Google's estimated cost for these procedures, even with 80% coverage, that's still going to leave me with several thousand dollars to pay out-of-pocket, more than likely.

That being said, I don't feel comfortable just throwing a random number out there because I truly am aiming to be as transparent as possible about my financial needs, so once I have those actual figures after the surgery, I'll update my campaign goal to reflect that.

In the meantime, here is what this current total of $4800 will go towards:

I'm grateful to anyone and everyone that is able and willing to donate, and I'll have lots of time to sit around and send you all 'thank yous' during recovery, so if you feel comfortable, don't be shy to donate under your name so that I can send you a little message on social media or a card through the post! I love you all and I'm just grateful to still be here <3