Help Me Make Ends Meet While I Wait For Surgery

Hi, my name is Jesse, and until February of this year, I was gainfully employed as a relief driver for a courier company. I drove a truck and picked up boxes. I liked what I did and had no shortage of work. Then, suddenly, my back decided to... not be a back anymore. After an x-ray, two CT scans, and an MRI, my doctor has identified the problem as disc degeneration in my L4-L5, which is causing pressure on my sciatic nerve and intense pain in my lumbar region and down my left leg. I cannot bend over, and I cannot sit upright for very long without pain. While there has been some improvement, it's only to a point. I'm currently waiting on a referral to a spinal specialist to see what he thinks is best to do with crippling pain that will not get better.

I was a very active and very strong person. I'm now looking at a situation where either I'm going to be getting spinal surgery with a long recovery time or I'm just going to be disabled for the rest of my life. That's the reality of what I'm facing.

I haven't been able to work, of course. I wish I could, but any sort of physical activity soon has me in significant pain that no painkiller I've been prescribed does anything for. I had a good deal of savings, and a good tax return this year, but that's all gone. I applied for EI, but the thing about my previous job is that I was a dependent subcontractor hired by individual drivers, not by the parent company, and this has made getting Records of Employment from all my assorted employers a bit of a headache. As such, it's taken a very long time to get to this point, and I am fighting bureaucracy tooth and nail every step of the way to prove that I have, in fact, worked enough hours in the past year to be eligible for an injury/illness claim.

We're at the end of the month and while I have my paperwork in, there's no guarantee it will make its way through everything in time for me to make my rent this month.

Any little bit that you can spare will make my life much easier, please.