Help Vrai stay housed during post-top surgery emergency

Hello out there, internet. My name’s Vrai Kaiser. You might’ve seen me credited as a freelance critic on this or that media site, or you might know me as an editor and the daily operations manager at Anime Feminist . It’s not the best paying work, but I’m so proud of the colleagues around me and the work I’m part of, helping to create a space where marginalized fans can talk about works they love in spaces that have often felt hostile.

What’s Your Financial Situation?

Recently, thanks to the support of my partner, colleagues, and the kind donations of so many out of you out there, I was able to finally have top surgery. I was totally overwhelmed by everyone's kindness, deeply humbled, and tried to plan everything so that I could get back to work without having to impose on people more than was absolutely necessary.

I mentioned in the previous post that my partner and my's financial situation was somewhat dire to begin with due to leaving an abusive situation with minimal time to plan. I planned the previous fundraiser to account for a month of bills, assuming the two of us would be out of work for about two-to-three weeks. It would keep us afloat, even with our pretty slim margins and basically nonexistent savings.

So What Happened?

Y'know how snow falls off of a tree, and then it starts rolling down a hill, and then it's destroyed an entire house?

About two weeks after my initial surgery, I had to check back in with my surgeon thanks to an alarming amount of bruising (I've included a photo at the bottom of this post for those curious). It turns out that I had developed a subdural hematoma on my left side--basically, a bunch of blood formed a pocket of sorts under the scar. While leftover blood works its way out over time thanks to post-surgical drains, I had way more blood than is average, and it would've taken several weeks to exit on its own. Since surgical drains are only meant to be in for 7-10 days, at least as my surgeon advises, leaving it in that long would be a serious risk of infection. It was much safer to schedule a second surgery, open me back up, and siphon the blood out.

The second surgery went really well! But it also meant that I was set back to zero in my recovery at a point where I'd originally planned to be getting back to work, doubling the amount of time it would take before I was able to go back to my physical day job and also depleting the amount of energy I had to do work-from-home tasks. I ended up restarting my day job, on reduced hours, almost three weeks later than I'd initially planned.

At the same time, my partner had multiple hours cut from their work schedule during the new year. Part of that involved having to take several additional days to look after me post-second surgery. But that wasn't all of it. They also experienced reduced hours from one job after the end of the holidays; massive storms also created almost a week of closures and reduced crewing; this all got so bad that at one point, she received an end-of-week paycheck for $25.

But life, bastard that it is, was not content to leave it there. It also thought, "I bet we can put some more bricks on this Jenga tower." In late January, our elderly dog (dog tax photo below) began vomiting blood and had to be taken to the pet ER. Even taking only the minimums, which were all we could afford (mainly an anti-emetic, in hopes that he was just caught in a cycle of irritating his stomach and throwing up until it started bleeding), the bill still came to almost $300 dollars.

In the midst of surgery and taking care of pet bills, it turns out that I failed to notice the registration and inspection of our car (the one we use to commute to those jobs we hadn't been able to go to) had lapsed. I discovered this oversight when we got pulled over by a zealous small-town traffic cop. A lapsed registration is maybe $80 on its own, but the way Pennsylvania traffic tickets work mean that the actual final price of the ticket was closer to $400.

Renewing that registration? Another roughly $80. We put off doing the inspection for as long as we could, but it turned out to be the last straw that made me feel like I had to return to GoFundMe: in order to pass the inspection, our car needs a new muffler. It only takes one kind, which will apparently (along with labor and the inspection itself), come to a little over $800.

In short....

All of those bills (closing in on $2000 in themselves) are on top of the continuing monthly bills, which also recently increased as we renewed our lease--the things that were originally all I had accounted for in the original GoFundMe. I'd been attempting to power through even with the additional weeks I was out of work, hoping that the small amount of savings would make up the difference. But this load of emergency bills is more than we can handle, even while working two jobs while my partner actively looks for a job with better hours. I've honestly forgotten what it's like to not feel like I'm drowning.

I'm sorry to ask this, especially so soon after the outpouring of support. I want to thank all of you from the bottom of my heart for everything, whether it was financial support or simply a kind word. It's been so crucial in trying to get through an exhausting year.

Please enjoy an adorable photo of our cat, Frisk. (And below that, the bruising photo for those interested).