Get the medical debt monkey off our family's back

As I've never done anything like this, I'm filled with trepidation in even typing these words. My name is Jeff Swigert. You may know me, or you might not. That you are reading this means that you are my friend, even if we haven't met yet.

Seven years ago, I was on a scholarship in graduate school in Ithaca, NY, and life was pretty dang peachy. On a fateful Tuesday morning, I got a phone call in a research lab I was working in telling us that our newborn daughter, Lucy, had tested positive for a life-threatening genetic disease called cystic fibrosis. Life got more challenging, but we attempted to adjust to new routines and treatment regimens and move on with life.

Believe it or not, we rolled our genetic dice one more time and welcomed Maebel into our lives. Weeks later, like the worst deja vu you can imagine, we got another phone call, and Maeby was also diagnosed with cystic fibrosis (which is where some of you may understandably wonder whether we had heard of contraception--we had, but we wanted our kids to have siblings and, to be honest, we still weren't sure what to expect with Lucy's CF prognosis as she was the bubbliest, happy toddler we had ever met). We are now savvier and decidedly done having kids, regardless of how cute they could potentially be ;).

We needed to take out some private student loans as our medical and living expenses started going up, and our bandwidth was stretched as we learned the new skills needed to care for our two beautiful, terminally ill daughters. It started with a $16K loan, but the next year we took out another $16K, and then we took out several more of these as my time-to-completion of my graduate work was drawn out by these inconveniently timed health issues.

We then discovered that the life expectancies of kids with CF varied substantially based on which CF center your kids received treatment. So, we decided to move midway through my grad program, and finish my degree in absentia, so that our daughters could be closer to Primary Children's Hospital in Utah, which has one of the top CF centers in the country.

Through the miracle of compound interest and occasionally deferring payments to this loan (when things got really tight), the burden now stands at $107,000. I got the job of my dreams, teaching economics, and I felt confident that I'd be able to chip away at this, and we'd get to yell "Freedom" at the top of our lungs when we paid it off in a reasonable number of years.

Then I was hospitalized for several days last month.

There is a part in one of my all-time favorite movies, Saving Private Ryan, where one of the main characters, a translator, keeps hearing soldiers use a term he didn't know the meaning of: FUBAR. He wondered whether it was German or French, but he couldn't find it anywhere in his dictionaries. Well, there are times in life when I think FUBAR is the most efficient term to convey the essence of this kind of situation. But, because our parents taught us better than to swear (too much), Micquel and I now use the term "clustercuss" when we are around the kids or in polite company.

Micquel and I still have two terminally ill kids we are trying to help in their fight for breath. I’m trying to come to terms with a new personal health shock and diagnoses which have made it medically necessary for me to step away from my dream job as a professor and take a medical leave of absence. I will be unable to work for an unknown amount of time. I hope it is only one semester, but my doctors tell me this depends on how quickly I can recuperate and get healthy enough to return to work.

Micquel has taken a part-time job as a medical scribe to make ends meet. But the ends don’t quite meet yet, so we have started to dip into the savings we had intended as a down payment on a home someday. Life has thrown a couple more complications into the mix. We have recently had to move into a smaller apartment. Then, a couple months ago, we had to switch to more expensive private insurance--the kind that doesn’t plan-exclude the life-saving medications our daughters need from the insurance formulary. My employer's health benefits did exclude these--there is more to that story, but I'll spare you the health economics lesson.

So, it kind of feels like the dream is collapsing, or the ship is sinking, or the invasion of Normandy has not gone to plan, or… pick whichever analogy you like, they all resonate with me right now. The fact that we are servicing six-figure student debt at a time when my ability to pay it off using the education it bought me has been jeopardized--that sinking feeling has led me to write these words and ask for your help. Will you help my family get this student debt monkey off our backs? We could use the bandwidth it is eating up to tackle the other problems in our life.

Thanks for your time. Sorry for...all of it. Everything. I'd much rather be in a position to help you or any of the many people I know who are hurting from the pandemic and 9% inflation and ... just the universal clustercuss that has been the last three years. And I hope that I can return the favor or pay it forward someday. But today, we could use your help.