Young Dad needs surgery. This is Colin`s Surgery Fundraiser!

I love someone in pain. His name is Colin and he is my husband and father of our two beautiful boys.

I love someone in pain. His name is Colin and he is my husband and father of our two beautiful boys. Colin is a fair dinkum Aussie worker and fighter. His strength and resilience are truly inspiring. He currently lives in Western Australia with myself and our two little boys. Colin is a small business owner with a tiling company – a normal day involves hard manual labour and he continues to work hard to provide for our family, despite his pain.

For many years Colin has suffered with pain. Committed to his healing process, Colin consulted with many health care professionals and to our dismay did not receive a diagnosis or adequate treatment or support for his condition. And as a result he continued to suffer unnecessarily in silence each and every day.

You cannot see Colin’s wounds or what causes his pain. Most of you don’t even know he lives in pain every day. I don’t know if you know anybody with chronic pain, but it is something that is always there. Could you imagine feeling as if you are stuck inside a body over which you have little control? Colin does.

Pain changes things. Colin still very much wants to enjoy being at work, going on adventures with his family, friends and leisure activities, however sometimes the pain puts that enjoyment out of reach. He may not know, from day-to-day, how he is going to feel when he wakes up and each day has to be taken as it comes.

Many people in pain have had to relinquish a lot of the things they did before their pain experience. Colin has the will to go out and about but sometimes has neither the strength nor the coping capacity as a result of the pain.

As you can imagine this has been hard for our little boys Master 5 and Master 2 to understand and equally as hard for Colin to accept. Our boys have been amazing throughout this journey! They both know that Daddy is not well sometimes and that means that we adapt our activities.

But mostly he will soldier on and manage his pain as best as he can.

Colin and I consider ourselves very lucky to have a small yet extremely supportive network of family and friends. And we continue to build that tribe.

After many years of chronic pain, Colin was introduced to a well-respected Specialist who pioneered the use of cervical total disc replacement in Australia. He was diagnosed with cervical intervertebral disc disease. At this stage just a diagnosis was progress!

Degenerative disc disease is a spinal condition caused by the breakdown of your intervertebral discs. Discogenic pain syndrome refers to the discomfort that a patient may experience as a result of a severely degenerated intervertebral disc in the spine. Colin has more than one disc affected. C4-5, C5-6 and C6-7 have degenerated and the degenerative process has led to more pressure being placed on his spinal cord (myelopathy) and his spinal nerve roots (radiculopathy.) Discogenic pain occurs most often in middle aged and elderly people but Colin is only 31 years old!

Colin’s condition is deteriorating rapidly.

Colin requires surgery and rehabilitation in order to make sure he continues to be the awesome husband and father that we all know he is. Surgery is scheduled for 2015. Colin has a fantastic medical team to support him in the upcoming cervical spinal surgery. The Specialist will be completing a C4-5 Cervical total disc replacement and C5-6 and C6-7 Anterior cervical decompression & fusion.

Unfortunately the surgery is not fully covered by our health insurance or the Medicare system. The surgery cost is $23,112. Insurance will cover $2,683. That leaves us with a surgery cost of $20,429. So we have created this campaign to try and help ease some of the financial burden of the surgery cost only.

Making the decision to have surgery, we had to consider that there are so many variables that come into the next steps such as travelling interstate to have the surgery done, the cost of flights & accommodation. This will also mean displacing the boys for a considerable time and they cannot attend school or their weekly activities. We live remotely in regional Western Australia so travelling anywhere is a major cost.

The most significant impact we can foresee, we will need to temporarily shut down our small business for a period of time. As much as we both love the flexibility of being self-employed, unfortunately it means that Colin is not entitled to sick leave or paid leave.

However at the moment we are both working extremely hard and saving to prepare for the rehabilitation period and what shall follow. We hope to get back on track as a family after Colin wins this battle.

For those of us who are lucky enough to have Colin in our lives, there is undoubtedly no one who deserves this more than him. Please help in any way you can and show your support in what will certainly be a knock out battle against chronic pain and living his life to its absolute fullest!

Thank you! x

19 December, 2014

So far we have reached an AMAZING $6,822 in total! We are truly grateful for everyone that has & continues to support Colin. The kindness & generosity shown by such caring people is overwhelming for our family!

We have definitely moved closer to getting Colin the surgery that he needs and the surgery is now scheduled for 2015.

Thank you!
Love from Colin, Kristy & the boys x