Support Kyle's Rare Condition & Surgery Recovery

In 2024, I entered a long recovery for a fractured knee. What should have been a short recovery became extended, despite physical therapy and supervision by doctors. I had been sick for a while with a series of infections, walking pneumonia, and major digestion issues. I had the general sense that something was wrong, but I didn't know what. I also looked healthy—I was active in the gym, I was vegan, I was working. The doctors would look at me and think: Kyle looks healthy, but because the bone wasn't healing quickly, despite not putting any weight on my knee at all, I was sent to other specialists, who discovered that I had two rare conditions.

All of this came at the worst time—shortly after my novel came out, and shortly after I got married to Richard, the love of my life, the most patient and loving person I have ever known. It's hard to properly state the toll here without using figurative language, so I will try to stick to numbers and facts, and there is no way of properly expressing how devastated my family and I have been by this without seeming to diminish how much love there is between us, and how lucky I am for my family and friends.

One condition is called Exocrine Pancreatic Insufficiency, in which my pancreas doesn't make enough enzymes to get nutrients from food, leading to malnutrition and extraordinary pain, which landed me in the hospital last year.

The other is a genetic condition called CSID—congenital sucrase-isolmaltase deficiency. Normally, the latter is diagnosed easily because it is genetic, but because I was adopted there was no family history, and the symptoms can mimic other normal problems in children. Both of these lead to serious malnourishment if left untreated, and unfortunately neither one of these was discovered until I was thirty-two years old, which has left multiple of my body systems degenerated.

When the doctor ordered a dexascan of my bones, they discovered that I had osteopenia, which meant I had low bone density, and this was why my bone was taking so long to heal. When we got the results, the technician said that there actually wasn't a scale to account for how badly my bones have deteriorated because the scale is measured against the post-menopausal bones of elderly women. Men this young and my age aren't meant to have this kind of deterioration, so there is no scale for it.

I was in physical therapy most of last year, attempting to heal from the stress fracture and osteopenia. During this process, we also discovered that I had degenerative disc disease—three slipped discs in my back, one of which I had surgery on December 30th of 2024.

Unfortunately, because my body has been malnourished for so long, my meniscus tore right before the spine surgery. Now, I am having surgery on February 12th, 2025, on my meniscus, in what will hopefully be the last surgery for a long time.

This will be third surgery in two years.

The financial toll this has taken on me and my family is... life-ruining. Although I am extremely lucky to have insurance through Richard, my extraordinary husband, we had to spend 10,000 dollars before they covered everything last year. Much of this on credit. This is just on hospitals, doctors, and PT alone—not counting everything else required when you are chronically ill and seriously injured. Not to mention the mental tax that being sick and injured for years has taken.

Any kind of financial help goes directly to ensuring that I can pay for treatment. I really appreciate anything and everything.