TL;DR If anyone has any work for me (strengths are Ruby/Rails, data mining) please email me. ilovemymomjeanine@gmail.com (will go to my professional email) -- This is in regards to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7214446
If you’re in Minnesota and would like to meet with me, let’s meet.
Very-long; will read:
I’m posting here so I can vent to people that I would normally talk to in my day-to-day life. My life, however, hasn’t felt day-to-day in so long.
It’s felt like one, long clusterfuck of a bullet train inside my head.
I’m not popular here or in the startup community (in the larger sense). I haven’t worked for any well-known startups nor do I contribute to any open-source projects. I haven’t developed any killer libraries and I don’t belong to mailing lists.
But I don’t let that define me. At all.
There’s nothing that I haven’t taught myself. I’m very prideful and mostly confident about my abilities, but I don’t consider myself an all-star at any one thing. I’m just pretty damn good at a lot of things.
I made a post on the Richard Lynch thread where we were discussing how the healthcare system is failing us because families shouldn't struggle to make ends meet. (and thus, my cover is blown) You have to go to page two to see the comment, and for the lazy: https://news.ycombinator.com/x?fnid=iFI3WthoE1Lln4guTBx4gL
My mom isn’t well. While her tumor is shrinking (it was originally the size of a baseball), her doctors continuously insist on more and more treatment to get it as small as possible, even though it’s stage-IV. Her treatments are so fucking specialized that even after the insurance company does their thing, we’re still out five-figures per treatment. It’s insane, and criminal. When asked if there were any alternatives, the reply is always, “this is what we have to treat her with. There’s nothing around it.”
While I’m not a conspiracy theorist, I’m confident in saying that someone is getting paid. Guess what? It’s not my mom.
There was news today, however, that with four more months of what she’s doing with her treatments, she might have bought herself another year to live. If everything goes to plan, she’d able to pump the brakes on all these hardcore treatments.
In August of 2013, I had in excess of $150k in my savings. This was from good client relationships, an acquisition, some domains I sold, a lucky lotto ticket, and always being thrifty. (and not spending money on clothes, though I desperately need some)
When it was confirmed she was very ill in late October of 2013, I moved back home. I packed up all my stuff, said cheers to my startup fam on the coast (which I was going to do anyway), and began a frivolous job hunt. I sold my car, and everything I could, because I knew what was about to come.
My bank account is nearly dry. It’s currently sitting at $10. Yes, just $10. My checking account is at $1.26, and there are no pending checks, or wires, coming my way.
Where did the money go? 97% of it went to my mom’s bills: 4 months of treatments, drugs, hospital visits, seeing specialists…
My father, who is a good man some of the time, hasn’t had a relationship with my mother for 25 years. How they popped out three kids is beyond me. (it’s funny because if you look at our birthdays, our dates of conception are all holidays!) There are politics behind that which I don’t care to go into but will if asked.
Sometimes he’s a good father, particularly to my brother -- why? I don’t know. He does nothing special, and has an assortment of issues (violence, anger). My sister, being the only girl of two generations on my father’s side, is of course spoiled endlessly.
My sister, while we’re on the subject: She’s my best friend, and she sticks up for me whenever my family (“ “) decides to talk shit about me -- because I’ve been so removed for so long, and still misunderstood, my mother/father/brother assume the things that happened so many years ago and applies them now. My sister will plead with them in tears in her eyes, begging for them to just get the facts straight.
What does my word mean? Very little to them. To my sister? Everything.
Here’s a picture. http://i.imgur.com/EZNKdI0.png Yes, she is beautiful.
My father is able to provide the basics, but not able to assist in the bigger picture of things for reasons I’m not cleared to know. He was taken back by me taking control up until this point, but now the future is up in the air. Will she get her treatments? That depends if it becomes classified as “emergency” by the hospital. I’ve spoken with the Patient Advocate Foundation and this is unfortunately the news I got.
Does my family qualify for assistance? No. Plain and simple.
Will my father step in? He didn’t for his own mother who he was close to, so I’m just going to assume he’ll continue to be negligent.
I can’t take out a loan because my credit is bamboozled. I’m already in about $6k in debt and it’s not fun.
I’m desperate to do what I can for my mom. I haven’t always been the best of son, but that doesn’t mean that I’m not trying to be now. I am doing what I would do for anyone, and because it’s my mom, it’s all that more dear to my heart.
I have a (mostly) full-time job right now, co-founding a startup that we’re bootstrapping. I’m yet to get a paycheck after almost 2 months of work because my co-founder hit a snag with some investors from a previous gig. I’m OK with this because in the long-run things will be golden. While those checks would be nice, they don’t cover much unfortunately. Thankfully, though, I have a lot of what I need to do done, so I’m able to look for other work to fill the gaps.
I’d get a full-time job but I don’t have a car and I live in the deep suburbs of Minneapolis. I’m also terrified of driving in the snow (PTSD). I Uber everywhere (I won some monthly credit on my account a while ago).
If anyone has any work they can kick off their hands / can put me to use for, I’d be gracious to take it. I know my ways with Ruby and I do love Rails. Lately I’ve whipped up some SaaS platforms, written APIs, conquered APIs, mined iTunes/Play Stores, built my mom an app to keep track of her meds, stuff like that. I’ll email a portfolio / linkedin / whatever when we talk.
To all of you, "Be Content with what you have; rejoice in the way things are. When you realize there is nothing lacking, the whole world belongs to you.”