Saturday, August 16, 2008

Sad

For those of you who don't know about the Gina/Pepe drama I'm not even sure I want to get you sucked into it but I just feel like I need to vent about this as it hits close to home.



Basically one or more parties were involved in defrauding people out of money and compassion by claiming a young woman named Gina suffered from Cystic Fibrosis, a deadly congenital and chronic lung disease. A fellow named Paul Mooney, who may or may not be a post transplant CF sufferer created a blog called Friends of Pepe (which no longer exists) initially in an effort to gain donations via his paypal site to purchase a Nintendo Wii for Gina, a friend via the internet living in the ICU awaiting her own lung transplant. Gina did, in fact receive her lung transplant after clining to the edge of life on ECMO (you may remember this term from Alex's story, ECMO is a machine that does the job of the heart and lungs, much like a bypass machine, in order to either buy a patient time for a transplant, (in the case of Gina) or to allow damaged organs to heal (in the case of Alex) and work on their own.



Gina then had a cascade of complications following her transplant ranging from pleural effusions to MRSA infections of the lung. She wasn intubated and exttubated multiple times and at the end of the facade, had been relisted for transplant.



The problem was, Gina never had CF at all. In fact while Gina was suppose to be in the ICU, she was, in fact, posting horseriding videos on youtube of herself and her horses and various trainers.



Now, what I think gets me the most about this whole thing is that now people doubt the honestly of anyone who has had a horrible illness. My own Alex's story was frought with so many complications, so many strange turns of events. ECMO, Heparin overdose, Splenic rupture, hundreds of stitches ripping out of his mended heart... the list goes on and on. I watched him suffer in that hospital bed every day while one strange setback after another plagued him.



And now, because of people like Paul Mooney and Gina, people will doubt the stories we tell about life in the ICU. The outpouring of love is the only thing that held me together in the days of life in the hospital and after, and to think that people won't want to extend their love to another because of people like these makes me downright sick.



I've been duped on the internet before, befriended people that turned out not to be who they said they were, but this has to be one of the most disgusting acts of deception I can fathom.



My apologies to Nathan at Confessions of a CF husband for my hurt and anger was displaced. Please continue to support him and his family, who must feel this deception on a deep level.



There is a group of people who are trying to sort this out and make sure the proper authorities become involved. If you are interested please visit http://exposetrolls.blogspot.com/

ETA: To the lady who asked why the comments critisizing me were not posted on this blog, I moderate my comments and as such they do not get posted immediately, if you care to check....they are all there now:) I moderate my comments to eliminate spam and trolls on my blog.


5 comments:

InsomniacRed said...

The "confessions of a cf husband"'s blog no longer exists either..

Rebecca (Ramblings by Reba) said...

Hi, Kat... I "followed" you from Nate's blog... I, of course, don't know the particulars of what occurred with you and Nate... but I think it's so good of you to apologize publicly, both here and at his blog.

I've been duped before both online and off... it's not fun... and it's REALLY hard.

Hugs to you...

CFHusband said...

Thank you very, very much. Sincerely.

Nate

Dayne said...

Confessions of a cf husbands blog DOES in fact exist, at www.cfhusband.blogspot.com
This is a stand up guy.

Just a smalltown girl said...

Yes CF husband's blog exists. It's my link that isn't working and for some reason I can't GET it to work at the moment, will have to try again in the morning. It's www.cfhusband.blogspot.com as Dayne said.

~momofmany