Help With Medical Debt Related to Alyssa's Brain Injury

It has been over four years since Alyssa suffered a devastating medical crisis caused by Addison’s Disease. Due to severe brain damage, she remains in minimally conscious state in a nursing home where she requires round-the-the-clock care. She continues to receive therapy which has helped her learn how to feed herself, and how to drink, minimizing her need to receive nutrition through a feeding tube. Beyond this progress, her condition remains the same. Over the past four years, her husband David has taken on the role of single parent while attempting to wade through the morass of health care bills, government paperwork and tax documents all relating to Alyssa’s extensive care needs. While a portion of her care is covered by insurance, a very significant portion has fallen on David. Over the years, the medical debt has accumulated to $225,000. As friends and family, we are hoping to raise funds to help pay down this debt so that David can keep the family home near Alyssa’s rehabilitation center. Thank you for your generosity.

HELP 46-YEAR-OLD WIFE, MOM & MUSICIAN ALYSSA KOGLER RECOVER FROM BRAIN DAMAGE – Contribute to Alyssa’s nursing care and healing therapies

In April of 2020, Alyssa Kogler's husband of almost 18 years, David, found her unresponsive in bed and discovered she needed urgent medical attention.

After she was rushed to the hospital in Frankfurt (where her family lives), the medical staff discovered that she was battling an unknown infection that led to sepsis and swelling in her brain (cerebral edema). She very nearly died that night. It was sometime after she miraculously survived that her doctors diagnosed her with a very rare disease called Addison's Disease (https://rarediseases.org/rare-diseases/addisons-disease/), which caused her body to have a highly unusual, nearly fatal reaction to appendicitis.

Although she survived, the brain damage Alyssa sustained was significant. She is in a minimally conscious state and is unable to walk, talk, care for or feed herself. The once vibrant, funny, talented, passionate, caring wife, mom of two, daughter, sister and friend to many was now silenced. And - due to COVID restrictions - Alyssa was unable to have regular visitors during her months-long stay in a rehabilitation center.

At the age of 46, Alyssa requires round-the-clock care and has not been able to return to the home she shared with her family near Frankfurt, Germany. Late last summer, she was moved from the rehabilitation center into a skilled nursing facility. Finally, in April 2021, after COVID restrictions were loosened, her children Amelie & William were able to visit their mama for the first time in a full year.

Thankfully, a combination of insurance and government aid covers much of her care and some therapies. But her husband David is facing a shortfall of approximately $1800/month (1550 Euro). These costs include not only her living accommodations and care, but also multiple therapies that give her the best chance possible to regain some of what she has lost - including physical therapy, speech therapy and music therapy. We see these various therapies as crucial to giving Alyssa the best chance to make a meaningful recovery.

Recently, family and friends who have had the opportunity to spend time with Alyssa notice that she is more alert and also perhaps has some awareness of the present. She seems to be working very hard in her speech therapy, and her music therapist has noted that she has had a positive response to their work together. He has hope for her continued recovery, and so do we.

We are grateful to anyone and everyone who wants to partner along with her family to ensure that Alyssa has every possible resource available to continue down the long, hard path to recovery. In the interest of full disclosure - Amy Lenhert, Alyssa's sister, is organizing this fundraiser, and will transfer all donations to David Kogler via wire transfer. All donations go directly to David Kogler to cover the costs of Alyssa’s nursing care (the $1,800 / month not covered by insurance and government aid) and her speech and music therapies.

 

Thank you for your generosity and may God bless you!

Alyssa’s loving family

P.S. See below for a note from Alyssa’s musician brother Matthew about her song “Undone,” which you can listen to via the YouTube link below.

From Alyssa's younger brother, Matthew Prokop:

The afternoon before she was rushed to the hospital, Alyssa had left me a few voice messages, asking me for help in sharing a song she had written. The song, “Undone”, is one that she and I had produced together about 2 years ago. [At the time] she was feeling – like so many of us musicians – unmotivated and struggling to put pen to paper. So, around Christmas 2017 (if my memory serves me correctly), I asked her if she had any song ideas that she would like to try working on together. I had always thought it’d be fun to take her absolutely incredible talent for the piano and pair it up with my mediocre – at best – feel for electronic beats and love for ambient synth pads. So, we went to our band’s tiny studio and laid down the piano and vocal tracks...Alyssa and I were very happy with the results of our collaboration.

In recent times, particularly since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, she felt so strongly about the song again, particularly its message of hope in even the darkest of times. She really wanted to share it with people.

Thus, with no further ado, “Undone” by Alyssa Kogler.

“Mercy for this time in the darkness / I’m looking to hills, to the One / There’s never a place you can’t find me / Be my refuge, be my strength because it’s all undone”