I don't know what the title should be...
My two passions are sports and politics. I post on this sports message board that was started after ESPN closed its general message boards and replaced it with boards on specific topics, mostly current events... There are two dozen or so of us who post there regularly so it's more like a club than a message board...Posting there is an eye opening experience because folks will say things online they would never say in person... There are some clowns who constantly post racist and homophobic things, probably to get a rise and probably because they are frustrated they can't express those sentiments in real life...When you realize that less than one in four white males is a Democrat and presumably somewhat liberal it all makes sense. The only other liberals on the site are the three or four African American guys and gal who posts there and one or two other white guys
Any way somebody went into a riff on welfare freeloaders and one of the posters volunteered that his son was born with holoprosencephaly and it threw him on Medicaid and caused his family to go on Food Stamps. As I said it's a small group or club that posts there so some of the members anonymously started a gofundme account for him so he could do something nice with his wife.
I don't have much money...But I wanted to do something:
Here's our correspondence with names redacted:
I know the board did something as a group but I was too slow to get involved.
Brian
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What is the prognosis?
Brian
Little Billy was diagnosed with holoprosencephaly or HPE. His frontal lobe is underdeveloped, which caused other parts of his brain and glands to be underdeveloped. He was born without a nose, with a bilateral cleft lip and suffers from neurological issues. Some of those issues are seizures, limited usage of his left arm and delays in physical activity.
He spent 8 of his first 9 weeks of life in the hospital...the first 7 in nicu. I practically lived off of chicken strips and mashed potatoes all 7 weeks. Outside of that, we also lived off of free In n Out meals from a raffle that my brother in law gave us. it was located 5 mins away from the hospital and wad free so we used them up. I haven't eaten any of these goods since he was first discharged last june.
Last week was his 7th surgery. He just turned 1 last month. Looking at him now, he looks like a pretty normal, healthy boy other than the tubes in the artificial nasal airways that the docs created for him. That was his latest surgery, opening up the airways more so that he can breathe better.
Basically with his condition, it is a wait and see process. We don't know what the future holds but his case isn't severe so we have hopes that one day he'll be able to function independently.
Billy
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I am going to buy a gift card at Target and send it to him...
It was a teachable moment for everybody.
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