Peggy's Medical Needs Fund

I have not posted for awhile and wanted to update my donors.

The fund continues to grow, albeit a little more slowly than before, and I am pursuing medical treatments that are keeping me afloat this Winter and have given me some degree of recovery.

I wanted to highlight a couple of acts of generosity, but also send a warm, heartfelt thanks again to everyone who has donated and moreover, to everyone who has sent me kind and encouraging words.

My poetry publisher, Switchback Books, has donated ten books to my fund to sell! If you want to order a signed copy of Pathogenesis, please let me know!

Also, the very fabulous Tristan Taormino has offered to give a free video from www.puckerup.com (some titles excluded) to anyone who donates $150 or more to my fund! Pass it on! Tristan also gave an incredibly generous donation to my fund herself.

Many thanks to Switchback Books and to Tristan for their kindness!

I also want to thank:

Homofactus Press for offering to donate 5 copies of the book Femmethology for me to sell for the fund! (if anyone wants to buy a copy -- contact me).

The fabulous writer who sent two twenty dollar bills tucked in a card yesterday.

Thank you both!

Since this fund is posting donations anonymously, I'm going to stick with that, but I wanted to say a huge thank-you to those who have donated privately so far -- their donations are not accounted for on the bar graph to the right:

$80 -- whopping thank you!!
$100 -- huge thank you!!
$75 -- many many thanks!!
$5 -- so kind & kind words too!

The total of private donations is now $260. Added to the total of $778 on the bar graph today, that means the fund has now reached $1038!!! Wow!

If you are reading this and want to take a small action to help out, please consider posting my blog to Facebook or Twitter (or copying the URL to your friends in an email and asking for their support!). If you know me and know my situation, it's always helpful to speak from your own experience. My blog URL is:
http://peggymunson.blogspot.com/2009/12/dear-friends-as-some-of-you-know-my.html

Small donations make a huge difference too -- most donations are in the $5-20 dollar range!!

I am so blessed this holiday season to know so many incredible people (old and brand new friends) who are willing to help out another in a time of medical need. I truly hope I can get well enough to help the many others I know who are close to the wire or almost hitting the wire right now. I hope those friends will keep holding on and feel some of the love I am absorbing right now.

Since the Medical Needs Fund started less than a week ago, we have raised over $500 dollars!!! (the graph to the right doesn't represent all privately-sent donations). What an incredible swell of love, support, kindness, and beauty I have seen this past week -- I cannot thank everyone enough. People have been telling me their own stories of similar hardship and struggle with illness -- and the solidarity alone has been gold to me. Some stories have been from able-bodied people who just relate to aspects of my story, such as the isolation -- and this reminds me how human some of these struggles are, and how much people need to band together and feel the ripples of community support I'm feeling now. The contributors have been friends and strangers, writing colleagues and activists. The donations have come from near and far (Sweden, the UK!). In my received and committed donations and written support, I have gotten donations (or promised donations) from a Pulitzer prize finalist, a Sirius radio DJ, a two-time Grammy nominee, and an international women's rights organizer -- as well as beautiful words from a close friend of Terry Shiavo's family, a couple running from toxic invasions in the New Zealand bush, another "survivor" just out of the hospital in a nursing home, and many others.

Please keep spreading the word about my fund if you are willing to help. The love and support have meant the world to me, and I promise to pay it forward when I can.

Happy Hanukuh everyone!

xoxo

In just a few days we have raised over $300 for my Medical Needs Fund. I cannot believe how many kind, angelic people have given support and written me words of encouragement. I want to also acknowledge an incredibly generous $80 donation I received that didn't get on record here (making the total $80 higher than the graph to the right shows!!!!). Thank you to everyone for this incredible support. I am squarely in the holiday spirit now, and I'm talking the cheesy, so-many-lights-strung-up-they-block-out-constellations level of spirit. I also want to extend a Happy Hanukah to my dear Jewish friends as the Festival of Lights kicks off!

I know some of the most incredible, giving activists, writers, and kind-hearted people out there.

Dear Donors,
You may be wondering why I set a goal of $6,000 for fundraising. This is the amount I need to continue the experimental treatments that have given me some of my life back, treatments that cost me $15,000 this past year alone. I know it sounds like a lot, but that's 300 people contributing $20 each, or 120 people contributing $50 each, or 600 people giving $10 each! You can help me a lot just by posting the fundraising widget onto your website, blog, or Facebook page! Please help me reach this goal so that I can get out of this next year alive!
xo Peggy

This is a fund to assist with Peggy's Medical Needs as she fights her way back from a catastrophic collapse after a natural disaster, a hospitalization, and seven months of being trapped in the corner of her bedroom and adjoining bathroom living in POW-like conditions with only about four minutes of human contact a day as she lost the ability to speak, became hypersensitive to all stimulation, and had to begin using a ventilator to breathe. Peggy was too weak to even crawl to her bedroom door or closet, and it is a miracle she survived. Peggy has been diagnosed with ME/CFS, MCS, Lyme and bartonella, and has exhausted all of her personal funds fighting for her life this past year. However, she has also benefited from aggressive treatments and more funding could assure her more caregiving and treatment options. Your help could save Peggy's life, and enable her to continue her writing and activism on behalf of the ME/CFS, MCS, and Lyme communities!!!