When I was twelve or thirteen, I made a best friend for life. She has become so close with my sister and I that we are more like three sisters than friends. But when we were still very young, before we caught up with the age gap between my sister and us, we hung out just the two of us.
We did all the typical girl things: made cards, drew pictures, talked about the boys we liked, read books, played outside... and always hanging around in the background, grinning at us as he peeked around the doorframe into my friend's room, or asking us to play with him, was my friend's kid brother.
I don't have any siblings except for my older sister, I have had a lot of guy friends I have felt pretty close to, but none of them has ever felt quite like this. As I learned to know my best friend, I learned to know her kid brother, and in time, he became like my kid brother too.
I learned that he was mischievous and had lots of ideas. He loved animals, was stubborn, creative, and had the most infectious chuckle I have ever heard. As we grew up, our paths continued to cross. But by the time I got married, my little brother was very busy and caught up in adult life.
Years passed and we did not see each other for a long time. I heard bits and pieces about what he was up to through my friend, but with her increasingly busy life, and her eventual marriage and move to the U.S., she was hearing less of him as well. More time went by and I basically never heard about my little brother anymore. I missed him a lot, I did not forget about him, and I prayed for him every night before bed.
A few weeks ago, he showed up in my neighborhood to take on a welding job in a shop belonging to a mutual friend. I was a little dazed at this sudden appearance and completely delighted. He stayed in the area for a couple of days to give the job a trial run. He can to our house to visit us and catch up on some of the time we missed. And he was still the same old little brother...
Six years ago, at the age of twenty-two, he was working on a welding job several stories up. He had just gotten to where he was going to work and was about to clip on with his harness, when he slipped and fell a whole story to the scaffolding below. He narrowly missed impaling himself on a metal bar in the process but he did damage himself nonetheless. The impact of his landing caused him to crack a disk in his back, and this in turn has led to pinched nerves, loss of feeling, and not being able to walk. He spent way too much time in pain, and way too much time in bed, and as you can imagine, his mental side suffered and he became depressed.
He tried a lot of different medical paths but the bottom line is, this disk needs replacing. When he was telling me about this I could hear the frustration in his voice. And it is frustrating to be told to take Tylenol and to go home and try to relax. It is tough to live with pain every day, but it is even more crushing when there is no help of any kind on the horizon.
He has tried job searching to see if he can find something he can do sitting down, but his job search has been rather fruitless. He tried applying for disability funding, but that hasn't worked out either. Finally, in desperation to find work, he agreed to take this welding job, and a couple of weeks in, he is already feeling it in his back. He badly wants to be able to move and work and live a normal life, but he is afraid he's going to start going backward again and we really don't want that to happen.
I never thought I would start a GoFundMe. But I did, and this is my way of sharing my brother's story and asking for help. If this disk in his back is not fixed, nothing can move forward. Even if he got a job where he could sit, even if he got disability funding, these are all just band-aids and this will not fix the root cause of this problem. I feel completely helpless. I am praying so hard that something can happen, that a miracle will occur to fix this problem. If I were a millionaire, I'd send him to Germany for back surgery in a heartbeat, but because I am not, I am reaching out to others for help. Please pray for my brother, that he can find healing, whether it be through God's hand on his body or through donated funds that will take him to a skilled surgeon.
If you are interested in donating something to help make this dream come true please visit: https://gofund.me/a4dcae80 and if you don't have a penny to spare, prayers are always free<3
P.S. Please feel free to share this story and link with others! We need all the help and prayers we can get.
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