Please Help Michelle Close out 25 years

My name is Michelle DiGiacomo Fitzgerald. I’ve spent my life helping others and it’s difficult for me to ask for help personally. I have suffered in silence for a really long time because I don’t want to be pitied; I am a devout Buddhist and as such, I am happy to simply be alive and celebrate each day in the service of others. This is medicine to my soul and I believe the secret to life is helping other people at all times.

I am about to be homeless, while living paralyzed in a wheelchair. I have nowhere to go but a nursing home, even though I don’t need a nursing home. That would actually kill me. No one will help me.

It’s Christmas and I’m trying to play Santa Claus all by myself and answer the Christmas wishes of 6000+ kids at the same time. If you could help me in any way, I’d be incredibly grateful. You can donate to my campaign to help me personally or answer a letter to Santa from a poor kid. If you have a little time and would like to hear more, please read below. There was no easy way for me to say all of this in just a few words, but I tried to tell my story as best I could.

With love and gratitude,

Michelle DiGiacomo

25 years ago, when I was able-bodied, I founded Direct Effect Charities (DEC) with my husband, Paul Fitzgerald. We were blessed to continue columnist Jeffrey Zaslow’s Letters to Santa (LTS) program, which ran for many years in the Chicago Sun-Times. We expanded the program to cover disabled high school students and created many other hands-on programs as well. We work with the Chicago Public School warehouse and their trucks pick up donations throughout the city and deliver them directly to the schools we serve. When Paul became an angel 16 years ago, our daughter Samara and I continued our mission, along with our sweet Mama, Lillian Barrett. Mama was Barack Obama’s secretary before he was senator, and he taught her everything she knows. She has been working with underprivileged children in Chicago for over 50 years, and it is a joy to work with her. Her 80 years of deep wisdom have taught us how to persevere as women.

I am now severely crippled, partially paralyzed, and I live independently in a power wheelchair. This is with the help of a personal assistant acting as my hands, in my home. I was not expected to live until the end of last year, as a result of living with a misdiagnosed crushed spinal cord for a very long time. (Thanks for that, Northwestern Memorial Hospital)

I had not eaten solid food in nine months and in May, nearly signed myself into hospice as I could no longer live with the severe and constant pain that consumed and destroyed my body. No one could help me or tell me why, despite my repeated begging and hospital admissions.

I literally planned my own funeral and did everything I could to keep Santa alive without me, including leaving DEC $50,000 from my life insurance and appointing my daughter CEO upon my death. I somehow feel responsible for Santa in Chicago and I did not want this wonderful tradition to die with me. I didn’t want to let a bunch of kids down, not to mention the donors who love to answer their letters year after year. It’s a program that brings everyone a great deal of joy, including myself, so I tried to do everything in my power to keep it going. I knew that nobody could run it better than Samara; she’s an expert by birth, learning early in life that there really wasn’t a Santa Claus. She was going to take over the reins of DEC.

Last November, I checked into Northwestern Memorial Hospital for what I believed would be the last time. Instead, I met a brilliant neurosurgeon, Dr. Najib El Tecle. He diagnosed my long-crushed spinal cord, using imaging from NMH that was taken a year prior. At that time, they told me I had a “small stroke” and sent me to Shirley Ryan Ability Lab, where they tortured me with inappropriate physical therapy for five weeks, while giving me dangerous combinations of pharmaceuticals/opioids to battle the intense pain they caused. Throughout that stay, I literally ran Letters to Santa from my hospital room and even provided SRAL with a great deal of new STEM toys for their hospitalized kids/patients. I didn’t have the money to run the Santa program and was struggling greatly to do so. A friend sent me a check for $5000 and literally saved Christmas, so I was able to get the ball rolling and make it happen. When I wrote a Medium story about my stay at SRAL two years ago, I had no idea that I was suffering with a crushed spinal cord, as my surgeon would later confirm on a video for my daughter a year later.

https://medium.com/@michelledigiacomofitzgerald/why-its-a-bad-idea-to-wear-perfume-at-work-c146ccb077b8

The surgery immediately stopped the constant and severe pain and my cold, hard body became soft and warm again, as blood once again started to flow. My skin stopped burning and I was able to move in ways that I couldn't before. I could swallow again, my voice went up five octaves, and I could sing. This made me so happy and I was incredibly grateful to be alive and playing Santa once again.

While my body was no longer being strangled minute by minute, I was now left with the aftermath of my long-term misdiagnosis. For the second Christmas in a row, I ran LTS from my hospital bed. I went to Shirley Ryan following the neurosurgery, but only in an attempt to get them to properly set up the wheelchair they built for me. I had been struggling to get them to fit it to my measurements and specifications and assumed if I was an inpatient, they would be able to accomplish this. They in fact made my wheelchair worse.

Nothing could have made me happier than playing Santa, except for the fact that I was no longer in constant and severe pain, that is. I truly knew that I wasn’t dying anymore and felt as if I had been given a new lease on life. I was so happy to continue my work with DEC and I spent the first week of December playing Santa Claus in a beautiful corner room, in an effort to be kept away from a perfume-covered staff, who didn’t understand allergic reactions.

I have spent the majority of this past year recovering from surgery and learning how to eat again and some of my paralysis is reversing. My body is decimated and my hips, knees, shoulders, and wrists are bone on bone. My teeth have all crumbled and need to be replaced. I cannot walk, but I am able to stand and pivot, with homemade personalized grab bars, which gives me the ability to use the bathroom and get in and out of bed on my own. This is with the help of my power wheelchair, which I actually bought on FB Marketplace because the one I received from Shirley Ryan Ability Lab was never fixed. They abandoned me, and I was unable to deal with the mess they gave me on my own.

One of the things I personally dream of is being able to take an actual shower again. Sometimes, I don’t feel human because I don’t have the ability to do so. While my apartment is said to be ADA, I don’t have a wheelchair-accessible shower nor are my bathroom sinks accessible to me. This is something I need to change as my only means of bathing right now is a sponge bath in my wheelchair, given to me by another person. I had to fight insurance in order to get a wheelchair that I could use in the shower, and when I asked my property manager to help me make my shower accessible, they refused. I paid a plumber to attempt to make the shower accessible to me by removing the large glass door. It needs to be reconfigured and is not safe to use as it is. The property manager refused to store the glass shower door for me, and it sat dangerously in my closet for many months until I finally threatened to complain about my ADA rights.

I was now faced with the problems that people who have lived in wheelchairs their entire lives face and it is heartbreaking. It's been hard for me to deal with alone as I am just one person and can only do so much. I pick and choose my battles and prioritize my basic needs before anything.

As if my physical struggles were not enough, I became the victim of a predatory nurse that I met while hospitalized at Shirley Ryan following my neurosurgery. She came into my room shortly after I arrived and asked, “How are you?” I broke down in tears as I was still traumatized and told her of my horrifying experience at Northwestern’s ICU a few days prior. From that minute on, she used my emotional and fragile state and started her incredible trail of lies to gain my trust.

As a journalist, I know that fact-checking is important and when I presented her stories about the hospitals she worked for to my editor, he asked for receipts. She could not provide them, but was so good at manipulating me, that I didn’t pressure her to prove anything to me. I needed to believe in someone or something, and I trusted her. I was incredibly vulnerable as a result of what I had just gone through and she had a captive audience.

She became obsessed with me, reading everything I had ever written or was written about me, and used her position to exploit. She set me up for 6 months with a trail of texts, making up lies about herself and used my tragic life story to gain my trust, until I actually hired her out of desperation when I lost my dear personal assistant of three years. I wanted to believe she was a kind and loving soul, until her flood of deceit came crashing down in a very short time. I had only seen her in nursing scrubs, but the minute I saw her in her street clothes, I knew that I had made a horrific error of judgment hiring her. I realized, very starkly, who she was.

On my first day alone with her, she started to try and manipulate me. She was incredibly cruel and spoke very badly of my longtime assistant of three years, whom I love dearly. She was my best friend, and this nurse was now telling me that she really wasn’t, that she actually hated me and that I was responsible for her cancer returning. She literally tortured me emotionally, telling me my best friend hated me and blamed me for her returning cancer. I absolutely knew that none of that was true, but it took me two days to fire her because when you’re paralyzed in a wheelchair and you can’t even make your own food, you are sort of beholden to the person that works for you. I was also trying desperately to get to the Disability Expo so I could get my wheelchair fixed and I needed her for that purpose.

I felt like I was in the middle of a Stephen King novel, and this woman made Annie Wilkes look like Mother Teresa. At one point, she had to dress me in the bathroom. I asked her to tear a pair of Depends Underwear she had just put on me, so it wasn’t tight on my body. She picked up an X-Acto knife that was in a cup on the counter, and I was literally terrified at the thought of her using it on my throat or elsewhere. I was looking into the eyes of evil and I was terrified, but I needed to get to the Abilities Expo and try to get my wheelchair fixed.

My head is mostly shaved, yet she couldn’t figure out how to fix my hair, which is simply washing my head and running your fingers through it to spike it. She suggested my driver Muhammad come up and try to fix it because “he’s a man.” We drove in different cabs to the expo and when she arrived back first, she came into my apartment without me, and stole marijuana, opioids, and God knows what else. She knew where everything was in my home as I had been training her for several weeks prior with my personal assistant present to try to get her acclimated and accustomed to my needs.

I filed a police report and told my story publicly, in an effort to stop her from exploiting anyone else. She then tried to extort $15,000 from me for defamation via a “confidential settlement agreement” from her lawyer. I would learn she has a long history with many employers in a very short time and they all can tell you similar stories about her.

Her abuse left me alone with no help for three months, and I am terrified of any stranger who walks through my door. It cost me thousands of dollars I did not have and put me three months behind on my rent. I reached out to every city agency possible for help and have been rejected. I applied with the Heartland Alliance, an agency the city contracts to help crime victims facing homelessness. They denied me help, even though I provided them with everything they asked for, even allowing a man to come to my home and interview me so that he could “verify” that I indeed was paralyzed in the wheelchair.

I quickly learned that there is no help for people who are abused in their own home. They are left to fend for themselves, and many simply end up in nursing homes and die.

After many rejections from social service agencies, I further humiliated myself by begging for food on a Facebook group, which I promptly took down a few hours later. At that time, I was literally buying large orders of oatmeal from a local restaurant and my friend Muhammad, who is also my taxi driver, would come to my apartment and put it in my containers and into the fridge where I could reach it. I was literally surviving on oatmeal that was prepared for me by my immigrant friend and taxi driver from Morocco. He cared more about me than any social service agency set up in my city, meant to help me.

The nurse is still literally trying to ruin my life and now is attempting to stop me from running Letters to Santa. She single-handedly destroyed a Sheepskin project we were working on for our donors at Christmas and then filed an allegation with the state that we were trying to profit from said project. As a result, the state told me I could not ask for donations to the charity at Christmas. However, I could distribute the letters to Santa. This is impossible to do without funds, so it left me between a rock and a hard place. I made the decision to start a personal fundraiser and I will do it on my own, just as I have always done.

Letters were already prepared and I had to remove the request in each of them that asked for a five-dollar donation to the charity. This was the absolute only way I could answer them this year and is exactly what I have been working on for the last few weeks. The schools have now changed the cover letter and removed the request for five dollars. This required a lot of time, work, effort, and energy for many, putting these letters together and taking them apart, reprinting 2 pages and putting them together again. It was exhausting and frustrating to many, but I wasn’t about to let it go. I have answered children’s letters for the last 25 years and I am bound and determined to answer the ones that I currently have.

I already have orders for at least 3000 and I will have just over 3000 remaining.

I am happy to say I have a wonderful new assistant who is now working with me. She takes care of me with great love and we have created a team to send out letters and fulfill our orders. Moving these letters about requires a great deal of dispatching and that’s what we are in the process of doing.

Once the letters are all out, I will man the phones until Christmas, answering questions and directing thousands of gifts through many thousands of hands, until they end up at their final destination school. Once they arrive there, the staff will sort them by class and on the last day of school, there will be Christmas parties at schools throughout Chicago. The kids wear pajamas, Santa visits, and each child gets a personal Christmas gift purchased for them with love from a stranger, like a giant happy Christmas morning.

It is perhaps just me, attempting to create happy childhood Christmas memories that I didn’t have personally. It’s really fun to do that for children and I often do. A few years ago, a little boy asked Santa for safety, as he no longer felt safe in the streets of Chicago. I sent the letter to President Obama and he invited him to the White House where he attended his final SOTU. This inspired us to create our upcoming program to help keep children safe, which we will be launching at the beginning of next year, Spare the Rod, Hug the Child. We believe more hugs will create safer streets and our programs next year are designed to address violence in the streets through the eyes of a child.

Our upcoming programs will require funding and we will use money raised from this campaign to continue the good work that we started 25 years ago. I’ve not been really good at fundraising over the years and my charity work basically survives because I continue to work for free and I have some really dear friends who help me to do so each year. Your help with this campaign will help us to celebrate 25 years and do something really meaningful to help the children of Chicago.

If you’d like to answer a letter to Santa, you can get one on our Facebook page at Direct Effect Charities Gratitude Cafe.

People often tell me that I am wonderful for doing the work I do, at which time I immediately tell them, I couldn’t do it by myself, nor would I want to. We have created a village and that’s what makes the world go around. And together, we are taking care of each other. I very much appreciate the support of my life’s work. Thank you for taking the time to read my story.

With love and gratitude,

Michelle DiGiacomo Fitzgerald