Providing for my family when I am gone

Hi. My name is Susanne and I am indestructible. A week after my 27th birthday I was paralyzed in an automobile accident and became a quadriplegic. I cannot walk, get myself out of bed, or move my fingers. Eight months later I was diagnosed with the flesh-eating disease, was told I would die for six months straight, and spent 13 months in the hospital. That was more than 20 years ago. I keep rolling on.

Four years ago, I started getting sick. I hated the taste of most food and started losing weight. I do not feel pain in most of my body so when there is pain my brain cannot identify, I sweat. I started sweating so much I thought my kidneys would fail because I peed so very little.

Doctors could not help me because I could not tell them exactly where I was hurting. The pain could be anywhere on about 80 percent of my body. About four months after the sweating started, we discovered I had a bad pressure sore on my hip. My tissue had died beneath the surface before it opened so we attributed the sweating to the pressure sore, even though previous pressure sores had not made me sweat to this extreme.

For three years I kept battling pressure sores and sweat. I would heal the wounds and a few months later I would be fighting them again, and I still hated food. In July 2018 I felt so miserable I told my wound doctor I thought I needed to be put into a facility because I was losing the wound battle and needed more help. None of rehabilitation facilities would take me because I had open wounds and needed to be on bed rest.

In August I went into the hospital to get a surgical debridement of some of my wounds and they did an MRI to look for bone infection. What they found were several tumors by my ovaries. Three months later I was diagnosed with stage four ovarian cancer as the cancer had spread to my lung before it was discovered.

From December 2018 until July 2019 I went through eight rounds of chemotherapy, a hysterectomy, and several surgeries due to complications. In early August I felt great, my CT scans looked clear, and my cancer marker number was low. Success; I beat cancer! I scheduled my next follow-up visit for November. In late August I ended up back in the hospital and needed surgery for scar tissue that was obstructing my bowels. The doctors saw tiny pinpoints of cancer all over.

So here I am with a terminal cancer diagnosis and I am preparing to die. I am planning for three years. It could be much less, and I am hoping for much more because I have a seven-year-old daughter, Mika (my other two children are grown). I would like to be rolling on 20 years from now like I am after my first death sentence. However, I must prepare for the worst.

I confess, when I left my job in 2014 and no longer had the life insurance they provided for me, I did not get my own life insurance policy. We upped the coverage for my significant other when we had Mika, and I have life insurance on all three of our children, but I simply never got around to getting my own policy. After all, I am indestructible. My significant other has recently expressed concern in his ability to pay for our home and associated costs without my contributions.

Depending on when I die, I expect to have $70,000 to $80,000 left on my mortgage. I am asking for your help to achieve my goal of making that number zero. I do not want to leave my family a lot of extra stress in their time of grief. I have started clearing the clutter out of my house so they will not need to deal with too many of my belongings. I am asking your help to ease my family’s trauma when I reach my expiration date.