Temporary assistance due to CHF
Donation protected
My name is Joshua James Brockman of Bethalto, Illinois. I was born with multiple heart defects, as a baby I went into cardiac arrest 3 times. Over the years I visited the doctors and ran the normal tests, but it wasn't until later in life that it started to get worse. I was 18 years old at the time, and the doctors always knew that a pacemaker was a very strong option but it never came to a reality until that day. My right side of my heart was very weak and the left side was not able to support it like it should. So that is when a pacemaker was decided to be put in. I had the pacemaker implanted in June of 2013. My pacemaker is always pacing my heart 90% of the time. Everything seemed fine, until around the end of December 2014. I had currently been working at SAMs Club at the time while attending college. I would be doing my normal routine at work, but I started to notice whenever I would walk I would start to get short of breath and would cough/spit up a lot of mucus. But for some reason these symptoms went on and off for a period of time, until March of 2015 when it started to get progressively worse. I remember walking into work and felt so bad I wanted to just lay on the ground and rest and not get up, and I thought when this was going on that it was all a form of bronchitis/pneumonia. I got sent home from work that day because I wasn't able to do anything at all. Whenever I got home from work I went outside and talked to my mom and she looked down at my feet and realized how swollen they were. And since my mom is a nurse she put all my symptoms I had together in her head and thought it might be CHF(Congestive Heart Failure). So me and mom went to Cardinal Glennon to visit one of my heart doctors I've had since birth, she ran a few tests and came into our room with tears in her eyes and said, "We need to send you to SLUH now". I was admitted to SLUH and diagnosed with CHF. The cardiologist were treating me for CHF, and a blood clot the size of a thumbnail in my left ventricle. They ended up sending me home a week later. Two days later after I got home, I received a call that says you need to come back to the hospital immediately Josh because you are in kidney failure. Kidney failure was due to the fact that they just pulled 60lbs of fluid off me in a few days which was a result of CHF. Doctors did a echo on my kidneys and saw a tumor on there the size of a golf ball, which was called Pheochromocytoma and is a tumor that grows on your adrenal gland and releases adrenaline that will ultimately destroy your heart. The doctors were all shocked when they saw this, because the chances of getting a tumor like this is literally 1 in a Million( less than 20k cases in the world each year) and only two doctors in the whole hospital have ever seen this before. I spent another couple weeks in the hospital where I finally got to go home after they had treated this and my heart failure for about two weeks. The doctors told me to go home and rest before my procedure in a couple weeks to remove this rare tumor. On April 30th the tumor was removed and I was able to come home and relax on May 5th. The tumor was not cancerous and that was a huge relief. In the past 4-5 months since then I have been taking it as easy as I can. But I am stuck at home not being able to be a normal adult my age. I can't work, I can't go to school yet, and I have to follow a certain diet which can get expensive. I'll also be on heart medications the rest of my life. On top of that I have medical bills starting to pile in, car payment, phone, and so on. I'm not asking for help to be greedy, I am asking because I need it and so I don't have to worry/stress out as much as I am already. This will help me, and drastically help my family pay all of my expenses. And this is only temporary until we see if my SSI gets approved in a few months. I found out recently that I will be getting a three chamber pacemaker, and if that does not work I will be getting a transplant. This journey that I'm on is not over yet and might never be. So thank you in advance for donating and helping me out! Love Josh!
Organizer
Joshua Brockman
Organizer
Bethalto, IL