Please help me get medical treatment and keep us housed

Firstly, thank you for reading. I’m not used to asking for help, but here goes:

I am a disabled, autistic person in a fairly bad situation. I have multiple chronic illnesses, some from birth, including Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, autoimmune inflammatory arthritis, Lupus/Sjögren’s, mitral valve prolapse, dysautonomia and POTS, endometriosis, etc. I have been without medical treatment for the past eight years, but things have deteriorated, and I’m very ill again with chest pain, cardiac arrhythmias, shortness of breath, and constant joint pain / dysfunction. It gets pretty scary sometimes.

I work as much as I can; I’m a ceramicist and I love what I do. But I’ve had an 80% drop in income over the past two years. This is in part due to my declining health but also because of the slow death of Etsy. Like so many others, my shop has been lost in a sea of mass-produced products and Etsy’s broken search engine. My husband works too, but due to dramatically increased competition, AI taking so many jobs, far fewer jobs being posted overall, and his being restricted by having to look after me, his income has also dropped considerably.

We’ve just passed a winter with no heating and are now struggling to afford food, rent, and bills, never mind the healthcare I need so desperately. We’re both exhausted and scared, and we don’t know what we’re going to do. My husband has about a month of work lined up but can’t find any more: if something doesn’t change, we’ll be homeless by summer. We have two lovely cats, one of whom was born prematurely and needs special food for life, but I don’t know how we can keep paying for it. But I cannot imagine life without them. They are my motivation for getting out of bed, especially when I feel too ill to get up but I have to.

So I’m asking please for enough money to start getting the medical care I need and to help us pay our bills for the next few months while we work out what to do. We’re living in a country that’s not our own, and that causes lots of problems; we would go home but we can’t afford the rents in our country (massive housing crisis). Right now, our plan is to get me stable and then work on the future. If I’m healthier, I can work more. I can do markets and sell in person. And my husband would be able to work more too, if he didn’t have to help me all the time.

Our basic monthly essential bills for rent and utilities total around 1200€. This is not counting food for us or the cats, fuel, or taxes. (Taxes here are very high, so we lose a significant portion of what we make every month.)

For my healthcare, some of it will be covered, but not all, and certainly not our travel expenses. We live far from any medical facilities, and farther from any that can deal with my conditions. So that will be a minimum of 1500€ just in this initial stage to get the process underway.

As such, I’m asking please for enough to help me get treatment and keep us all off the streets. (I will have to pay tax on any donations made, so the amount is to cover that too.)

And we’ll see what happens from there.

Thank you for reading and for any help you can give.

Have a lovely day people.