What started as a strange sore on one local man's foot has resulted in an emergency amputation, and a family member scrambling to help him financially.
What started as a strange sore on one local man's foot has resulted in an emergency amputation, and a family member scrambling to help him financially. Dan Warren survived losing the lower portion of his right leg in April, and the self-employed man has no income to live on.
“He had a blister on his foot and didn't really think anything of it,” his daughter, Angela Putnam, recalled. “He just kinda noticed it there. Who thinks a blister is going to fester into that?”
She said that he initially thought that the doctor could prescribe some antibiotics to be rid of the problem. Instead, he was sent to the University of Alberta's emergency room post haste.
Putnam herself was kept abreast of the situation via text updates from her mother.
“I was kinda like, ‘What the heck? I don't understand.' A little panic started to set in. The best-case scenario was that they would scrape off all the dead skin. They ran tests seeing that there was gangrene. It was apparently in his leg for months and nobody knew. It was already through his whole leg. My dad never showed that he was sick.
“Unfortunately, it came back that he had to have the worst case scenario.”
His right leg was amputated from the knee down, as was a toe on the left foot. That was back in April.
While the lifesaving surgery left him free of the necrosis of his limbs, it also presented a new challenge to his livelihood. Warren is now unable to get to and from his worksite as an instrumentation specialist in Fort McMurray. He does contract work and has no insurance benefits.
Without work, he also has no income. That, plus the medical costs are still accumulating. He is undergoing rehabilitation and learning how to walk with his new prosthetic limb. Putnam said that her parents are slowly running out of money and running out of time.
“I think they have enough for three more weeks and then they're hooped.”
That's why she started a crowdfunding campaign on the FundRazr website to help her father financially. The campaign's goal is to raise $50,000. The tally was nearing the $10,000 mark by Monday afternoon. She stated that the campaign doesn't need to meet its goal in order for funding to come through. FundRazr offers the option of having money come through every week, so Warren has been able to realize the benefits of the community's support in a timely manner.
The FundRazr page is located at www.fundrazr.com/campaigns/dkKSd.
