Emergency Travel Fund

To the most recent anonymous donor:

THANK YOU. You just bought my round-trip ticket back when my mom is out of the hospital.

I have a feeling the hardest part is yet to come and I am so glad I can be there with her then, too now.

Hello to all my Fundly friends!

First of all, I want to say THANK YOU from the bottom of my heart to everyone that supported Lisa’s campaign for me, either by donating or simply spreading the word. Your help has been immensely appreciated and I can’t even express how touched I am that a bunch of strangers, near-strangers, and friends pitched in on this campaign. It made things so I could move freely around California on what I’m now calling “My Vacation From Hell”.

I should start at the very beginning because the information on the Fundly page is spotty at best. It was created when I was still getting the details about what had happened and was very, very stressed out. Sometime between midnight and 4:30am on November 10, my mother crashed into a telephone pole on Santa Clara Ave in the city of Oxnard, CA. From the wreckage of the car, it looks like she went into the pole at speed. The car buckled and bounced up into the pole and we don’t know how long it was between when she crashed and when someone noticed the accident and called 911.

My mother lives in Covina, CA, almost 90 miles away from the scene of the accident. She was last seen leaving my grand-uncle’s house in La Puente, CA at 9PM Sunday night the 9th, and we have no idea how in the hell she got as far as she did. She drove a ’96 Toyota Tercel that would fall apart if you looked at it the wrong way. The last person to see her was a gas station attendant at Santa Clara Ave and US Highway 101, where she filled her tank with gas at 12:06AM.

Full disclosure here—my mother has struggled for several years with opiate addiction. I do not know when her problems started exactly—there are just too many things I can overthink while analyzing this—but I suspect that the problems started when she had cancer about 3 years ago. Some of you may remember that I put out a call for funds then too, and was able to raise enough money to cover a co-pay for a surgery for her cancer care. The past year has been especially bad and our family were making plans for an intervention, but we had been running into the problem of finding funds for a bed or a rehab that 1) didn’t suck and 2) accepted MediCal, her insurance. The two requirements were, sadly, mutually exclusive. In that time she was tipped off—we don’t know by whom—and got very good at pretending she was on the recovery wagon.

She fell off that wagon on the 8th. She crashed on the 9th. If the car had been a foot farther to the left, I would have made a Fundly for funeral expenses, instead. I have not had enough time to process how I feel about that fact.

Please don’t get me wrong. I know I should be thankful that she is alive, but she has a very long road to recovery and there is a distinct possibility for her to be permanently disabled as a result of this accident. If that happens, it is most likely that I will become her primary caregiver, and the thought of that terrifies me.

I’ve found out in the past week that time passes very slowly in the hospital. You can ask for a doctor and not see one for hours. Social workers and psychologists pop in and out but you can’t count on them to show up when you summon them. You just have to be in the hospital all day and hope for the best. A lot of this is hoping for the best. Add the fact that my mother needs pain medication to heal properly and is (understandably) refusing it and you just have one big, depressive mess. Yes, there were some silver linings—I was able to use my rented car to drive to the Inland Empire to meet my niece and nephews—but other than that, I have had very little time to rest, emotionally or physically. I am tired and every day I spend here is one less day at work and at school. I was running A’s in all my classes for teacher licensure and content, but the likelihood that I will keep them has now dwindled to almost nothing.

I should still be thankful that my mother is alive.

I used the Fundly funds to make a large enough payment to my credit card that I would be able to rent a car and get around. I bought gas, meals, and groceries for my gracious and long-suffering hosts. I spent the extra money to buy a ticket home that could be changed in case of emergency (I used it, more on that in a minute). I bought the new Amanda Palmer book so I could have something to read when my mind could no longer focus on chemistry and psychology. But I’m tired. Very tired.

I am currently in the ICU at Ventura County Medical Center, just a few miles away from the beach. I was getting ready to board a flight home—I just got a job as a full time teacher and I was hoping to get a few days to give my Minneapolis students closure and rest before starting on Monday—and I was, quite literally, getting ready to board when I got a call from a surgeon saying that she was going in for emergency surgery. They’d found air and blood in her abdomen and had to open her up for exploratory surgery.

That brings us to where we’re at right now. She was downgraded to the Departmental Observation Unit, but got moved back to intensive care post-surgery. I missed my flight but was able to reschedule for Sunday morning. I had the choice of either bus/train/bus back to Ventura from LAX or renting a car, both at absurdly high costs (Enterprise Rent-A-Car was able to hook me up, but airport rates are airport rates are airport rates, and they’re not at all pretty). My luggage made it back to Minneapolis but I didn’t, which means that I literally have nothing but what’s in my carry-on bags and the clothes on my back.

Let’s just say it’s looking rough.

Let’s also say that while it was looking rough, there are some silver linings. Google told me that the Pacific Coast Highway was the fastest way to get from airport to hospital given the traffic. I don’t know if you’ve ever had the chance to drive it, but those 27 miles of Malibu are some of the most breathtaking views I’ve ever seen, shitty circumstances or no. Let’s also say that while this was hard, it would have been impossible without the help of everyone that contributed to this campaign.

For that, Fundly friends, I can’t thank you enough. I’ll update as I hear more, but for now I wanted to make sure that you knew what was going on and where your money has gone.

Thank you. Thank you. THANK YOU.

Love,
Ari

I'm completely honored and humbled by all of the massive generosity that you've all shown in helping Ari. It's great to be reminded that there's so much kindness in the world, especially since, looking at the donors list, a lot of you don't even know Ari personally.
I'm going to stop the push on the campaign now, because we've (in less than 12 hours) reached the goal for her initial needs... However i'm leaving the page active for now until Ari's had some time to assess the situation, find out more about her mom's condition and recovery, and find out if she'll need to be returning to LA in the near term, at which point we may up the goal and push again.
Thank you again, from the fleshiest bits of my sometimes cold heart. I feel really like the Grinch right now, my heart has grown at least 3 sizes.
When things are calmed down for Ari, i'll give her the password in and such so she can update you personally.