Friends of Geraldine

Hello friends,

I’ve spent some time over the past week reconciling the donations and medical expenses. Your contributions have been extremely helpful, and as promised, have only gone to expenses related to Geraldine’s ongoing battle with this disease.

The donation tracker was a bit off from the last time that we had it live.  It had recorded about $7100 in donations directly from the site. However, after reconciling this, I found that it the actual records in Paypal added up to about $6700.  Some folks had problems with the Paypal interface and tried to donate multiple times, which inflated the numbers in the tracker by a small amount.  Paypal also charges fees for processing these transactions, so about $6500 went directly to the bank account that has been set up for this site.

Geraldine has paid around $8200 in expenses related to her treatment. However, there were also other donations that people made by check or to her family directly. These were immediately deposited into the same bank account. So, as a result of all of you who donated via the site or otherwise, her expenses have been completely covered.  I can tell you that this has been a huge relief to a woman that has been placed on disability, but would rather be working and cancer-free.

Bills are still trickling in, but there is still money left over to cover them.  There’s also a possibility that some expenses may be reimbursed by the insurance company. That money will go right back into the donation pool.

Once this process is complete and she hopefully makes the recovery that we all hope for, the remainder of any of these donations will be given to another person or group in need.

As of right now we won’t be bringing the donation utilities back online until we have some kinks worked out.  There may not be a need for further donations anyway, so if we do re-launch it, we would likely do so only to test the functionality for future cancer bloggers.