SOS, Friends and Neighbors: A Horror Writer Needs Your Help

A few weeks ago, I got a Facebook message from one of my best friends, Candace Nola: She was in the hospital. Slam-packed busy with working her full-time job, parenting her teenage son, running her publishing company, writing her own books, and editing for clients, Candace is busier than any other human being I’ve ever met. She also sleeps less. A lady never reveals her age, but I’ll bet Candace is the only contributor to our upcoming peri/menopause anthology Half-Moon Hysteria who still pulls all-nighters. She’s one well-acquainted with exhaustion. So I shudder to imagine how exhausted Candace must have been to decide that after nearly fainting three times, she needed to check herself in an emergency room.

Candace’s hemoglobin had plummeted so far that if she had waited much longer to get help, she might have died. I’ve suffered from iron-deficient anemia, and I know how utterly debilitating it can be. With a hemoglobin of about 7.8, I was afraid to drive for fear of passing out; I couldn’t walk more than a couple hundred feet without running out of breath. I slept seventeen hours a day.

Candace’s hemoglobin was 4.4.

The doctors pumped four bags of blood into her that day, and after that, she suffered a difficult and painful allergic reaction, which they’re still managing. They discovered that a nutrient absorption issue means that Candace will need these iron infusions multiple times a year. Forever. Or she’ll die.

I could insert a whole screed about medical care in modern America here. I won’t bother. Americans know too well what it looks like, and the rest of the world stands appalled. Our drugs costs are staggering; our insurance companies rake in profits. Hospital CEOs retire with golden parachutes while everyday Americans lose their homes from medical debt.

If you want to know why I love Candace Nola, well, here you go, in her own words:

Horror authors are some of the most broken and fragile souls that I’ve ever met. But they are also some of the strongest, bravest, and most determined people that I know. It is our pain that allows us to write the things we write, it is our trauma that forces us to bleed across each page, and it is our sense of wanting to ease that pain, if only for a moment, for a reader that might be suffering from the same. . . I get up and I show my support for this industry because I must, because it’s needed, because I need to applaud those of you that are making the effort too. . . Our support of each other, our encouragement of others, is what keeps this community going. It is why so many of us call it a family, or our tribe, because that is what it becomes. My peers are my tribe, my family, and my home. I stand with you and beside you. This is where I belong. This is where I’ll stay.

Candace needs us right now, friends. She needs help to pay for her immediate medical care, and she needs help to pay for ongoing care. She’s also one of those people who hates to ask for help.

I firmly believe that the greatest of human needs—and the one we tend to neglect the most—is the need to be needed. We all want to count ourselves vital to the greater workings of the world. We want to wake up and know that we helped, that we mattered, that we did something. This is the sum of a life. This is, in the end, what matters. Did we help?

This is your chance to help.

Here is the link to Candace’s GoFundMe. Every little bit will help her pay her medical bills. And just as important as her bills, every bit will help ease her mind, and every bit will tell her that this community cares for her as much as she cares for it. She’s poured so much into us.

Time to give it back, friends. Please.

And if that GoFundMe is fully funded when you click on it: her daughter (a wonderful person in her own right) set a low goal, and Candace needs these infusions forever. Please give what you can.

Thank you for helping. It means the world to me that you’d help Candace. I love her.

Eliza