Help baby Cam on his journey to health

Hello my name is Tia, and my best friend’s family is going through an extremely hard time. She is a single mother to her first child, Cam. Cam was born with tracheomalacia and had to have an emergency airway surgery when he was 5 weeks old. They were told it would fix everything and the odds of him needing more surgeries was not likely. Immediately after the first surgery he began to have a “chronic cough” and was sick constantly. Every time she took him to the doctor, he had a different respiratory illness or virus. She was in nursing school and working as a CNA to give her family a better life while Cam’s father helped with some of the parenting duties since he had a more flexible work schedule. Shortly after Cam’s first surgery, his father left them, along will all of the finances and parental obligations. She had to quit school and get a part time job as a waitress to try and cover all of the bills and baby items. Cam started getting sick so frequently that she lost both of her jobs because she was the only person who could pick him up from daycare or stay at home with him. They made countless trips to the ER for dehydration and malnutrition. Despite her efforts of trying to make a living while caring for her son, she lost their house in September 2023, and had to move in with a friend. A couple of weeks later, Cam stopped eating, drinking, playing, and became very ill. Cam was diagnosed with another respiratory virus, this time it was Covid. They went home and he began having a really hard time breathing, sometimes he would even stop breathing completely. She took him to the ER where they were rushed back for critically low oxygen levels and he had lost 10 pounds in 3 weeks. During their long hospital stay they found out he also had RSV and pneumonia. They were told by multiple doctors that he was a very complex case and had multiple different things going on with a long road ahead of him. He has anatomical abnormalities that require more surgeries, he had seizure-like activity and they had to bring on a neurologist, and the cough her 16 month old always had was actually him choking on liquids that had began to fill his lungs. Because of this, Cam needed multiple sources of medical attention, one of which was the insertion of a feeding tube where he gets constant nutrition and medication for 18 hours a day to prevent him from losing any more weight or damaging his lungs any further. He is unable to eat or drink anything by mouth due to his choking risk and weakening throat muscles and he will have to be on a feeding tube for the forseeable future. He couldn’t tolerate most of the feedings they tried and they would make him more sick, so he is now on a special, costly, formula that has led doctors to believe he also has something going on with his stomach. Once Cam was healed from the pneumonia, they were sent to a different hospital for another airway surgery. Things did not go as planned, and they were only able to do a portion of his surgery because when they opened him up the surgeon said he had no idea how sick he really was. He was admitted straight back to the Children’s hospital because his feeding tube had migrated into his sinus cavity and started to get a very bad infection from all of his medications and feedings going into the wrong place. Cam has a very long road ahead of him with many more corrective surgeries, speech therapy, scopes, and biopsies to be able to diagnose the root cause of some of his illnesses. They have to wait until Cam is healthy enough to undergo another procedure, and they are not sure when that will be. Because of his weak immune system they do not leave the house aside from doctors appointments and hospital visits, where the last two times he was there he picked up other hospital aquired viruses. As a first time mother, single mother, and a mother in general doing everything on her own, Raigan is exhausted, discouraged, and feeling defeated with the stress and height of their medical and financial bills. Since she is now unable to work and is Cam’s full time caregiver, they have found themselves in what seems to feel like a financial

spiral which has been excruciating on top of everything else. I’m creating this go fund me to try to help them alleviate the costs of the bills that have made this already stressful journey even worse for their family. The only thing Raigan and her family need to worry about right now is getting Cam the treatment he needs. A like, share, donation, anything helps at this point. Thank you so much for taking the time to read this.