This is Miriam. She’s 13 and lives in Utah. In August, she is going to have brain surgery. A malformation of blood vessels in her noggin, probably growing since birth, recently began to cause seizures. The doctors have concluded that surgery is necessary to prevent further, potentially life-threatening, damage.

Now, your thoughts and prayers and karmic wishes on Miriam’s behalf are certainly welcome. But that’s not what this is about.

Miriam’s mom and stepdad have health insurance, fortunately. But they also have a $5,000 deductible. They also have another child who began having seizures around the same time as Miriam — seizures which turned out to be caused by something totally different (and far less severe), but which nonetheless required numerous tests and specialists. Oh, and a third kid had an asthma-related emergency-room visit, despite her many and expensive asthma medications.

The point is, Miriam’s parents have enough stress and worries without having to deal with a $5,000 insurance deductible on top of it.

So here’s what we are going to do.

We are going to raise the $5,000 ourselves. Each of us is going to contribute a little, as much as we can afford, whether it’s $1 or $100, or another amount in between, or more than that. (But not less than a dollar. Come on.) These contributions will add up and Miriam’s parents won’t have to worry about money when they are already worried about Miriam’s brain surgery.

BRAIN SURGERY, FOR CRYING OUT LOUD!

PayPal is the easiest way to do this. Miriam’s mom, Sarah, has a “Donate” button on her blog. Go there and click it. The account is jointly owned by Sarah and her husband, Richard. Sarah had to be coerced to let us do this fundraiser — a certain amount of pride-swallowing is involved in accepting help from strangers — and has promised that every penny will be deposited into their health savings account so it can only be used for medical expenses.

I will vouch for her as well. This is legitimate.

For more background, here’s a blog post Sarah wrote a few months ago, before it was clear that surgery was needed. If you would like to contribute via check rather than PayPal, email me (the contact form is under the “About Eric” tab above) and I’ll tell you where to send it.

OK? OK. Let’s do this. As you can see, Miriam is a “Weird Al” Yankovic fan. Surely this grants her a special place in our hearts.

UPDATE: Sarah informs us in the comments below that more than $500 was contributed in the first 24 hours! That’s fantastic! Keep it up!

UPDATE #2 (6/22 afternoon): Sarah reports that we’re at $1,200 already! Please keep spreading the word through Twitter and Facebook and things and such.

UPDATE #3 (6/25 afternoon): Just over $1,800. This is great/not enough!

UPDATE #4 (6/26): Thanks to a few giant donations, they’re at $3,000 now!

Donate here.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 20th, 2012 at 12:35 pm and is filed under Announcements, Personal Life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.