PLEASE HELP Jake DeMarco

PLEASE HELP Jake DeMarco
Dear friends,
In 2004, Jake DeMarco graduated from Lyman Hall High School healthy and excited about attending Johnson and Wales University, having been awarded a full scholarship to pursue a career in hospitality management. Jake today is bed-ridden, overwhelmed by disabling pain and chronic vomiting, and facing lifelong paralysis. Jake has overcome challenges throughout his twenty years, but none of this physical magnitude. His grandmother and legal guardian has contacted me to ask for help.
Jake suffers from Chiari Malformation, a birth defect illness whose systems do not present until early adulthood. In simple terms, a herniation of the cerebellum, the bottom part of the brain, descends out of the skull and crowds the spinal cord, putting pressure on both the brain and the spinal cord. It took nearly a year to identify Jake’s disease, and state and federal services are still being negotiated. The only intervention is Chiari Decompression Surgery, which will alleviate Jake’s pain and allow him the ability to become mobile, but there is no cure.
Jake’s problem is that the increasing size of his herniation has made decompression surgery an immediate need, but the cost is prohibitive. Few surgeons in CT have ever done this very specialized surgery, but at the Chiari Institute in Great Neck, New York, which was developed in 2001, they have performed thousands of these surgeries and are recognized world-wide as the best chance any Chiari patient has for a successful outcome. You can find more information at www.conquerchiari.org.
Please help those of us who were touched by the grace and dignity of Jake Demarco during his high school career to help fund the cost of his surgery. There is no cure, but if Jake’s pain can be alleviated and he can regain his mobility, you will have provided Jake some hope from the despair he faces today.
Contributions should be made out to the Jake DeMarco, Chiari Fund, Peoples United Bank, 930 North Colony Road, Wallingford, CT 06492 c/o Heather Abel.
Thank you in advance for any contribution that will get Jake to the Chiari Institute as soon as possible.
Sincerely,
Andrew Candido
sTC Coordinator
Jake’s Foodservice teacher at LHHS in 2004