When It Was All Over We Slept for Three Days

Whoa my goodness

So THAT happened

I started the drive in the middle of the night because I thought it would be a smart idea to ease into it, but thanks to the efforts of INSOMNIAC GAMERS and THE BRITISH and FULLY LOADED ADULT BABIES with mugs of warm milk in their hands, half of the money had already been raised by the time I went to bed. The idiot line rose unbidden in my mind, Wow, this is such a whirlwind. Anyway, when I woke up we were even closer, and then a bunch of people all tweeted about it and there was a sudden flood of donations. We hit $10,000 at 2 o'clock, which means we raised the money in about 14 hours. 586 people donated. Thank you to every single one -- EXCEPT the satans who donated $6.66 and the criminal weedheads who donated $4.20.

Here is the specific out-of-pocket breakdown from doctors -- this is after insurance:

RIGHT EYE

Pre-op, procedure and post-op: $1,760

Physician fee: $660

Facility fee: $1,105

Implant fee: $1,095

Anesthesia fee: $500

$5,120

LEFT EYE

Pre-op, procedure and post-op: $2,100

Physician fee: $132

Facility fee: $221

Implant fee: $1,095

Anesthesia fee: $100

$3,648

Total: $8,768

NOT INCLUDED

Clean-up laser surgeries: About $500 per eye total

Total: $9,768

We actually raised a few hundred over thanks to an extremely generous last-minute donation, which will thankfully pay for the sweet fancy bifocals that he'll need when it's all over. Oh, and the awesome @helytimes and a few other people asked me about a charity they could possibly give to if they had been too late to donate, so I looked around a bit and the International Eye Foundation seems like a good fit if anyone else wants to do this! They do lots of cataract surgeries in developing countries because obviously cataracts are a leading cause of preventable blindness all over the place.

ALSO, MORE ON THAT CATARACT TIP: Jason hasn't been able to read either books or his Kindle for a while now, so with my AMAZON BIRTHDAY GIFT CARD (I'm a freaking martyr! I was gonna buy biographies of the Modernists with that gift card!) we got him a Kindle Fire because you can reverse the text on those. (You can also, obviously, do this on the iPad, but that ... was not ... a reasonable purchase for us.) SO if you are a little poor and your eyes get really tired when you read the Kindle Fire is recommended! He named it KAREN after my mom, because he is in love with her and their romance deepens every day.

THE CRYING PART

It was so nice to be able to do this because I have basically never been able to help a human being in any material way whatsoever, because I am just like ... a motionless lit veal that occasionally opens her mouth to moan for water, ice cream, or more biographies of the Modernists. I can help someone by saying a joke about brontosauruses! I can help someone by writing a poem about Dracula! But no one pays you for that and that is probably best. So I was thinking, why would people do this for a lotus-eating Fucker who spends most of her days lying prone on the floor trying to think of sweet metaphors, and there is no good reason except that this is the end of the movie, and the end of the movie is the part where all the humans get together and do ultimate teamwork with explosions and kindness, and the aliens go wow, look how good they are, and decide not to blow us all up.

(Disclaimer: I have never seen a science-fiction movie)

Thank you all so much for everything -- thanks to everyone who gave or spread the word or made super-tasteless eye jokes to me when I was feeling so bad. It really, really, really helped and you are the best and I love you.

JASON WILL CHANGE HIS NAME TO "TWEET" IF THE PEOPLE DESIRE IT

The first surgery, like I said in the previous post, is scheduled for June 27th but we're trying to see if we can get it moved up. Rest assured I will post a TON of pics of him wearing the Darth Vader glasses that you have to wear afterwards!