Bikes Blues & BBQ 2018

First annual Ink and Art in the Ozarks at the Fayetteville Town Center Saturday 29th 2018 from 4pm -7pmyou can find us here while we rally together & raise money for Shawn West!! Shawn is in dire need of a new kidney!! We are here raising awareness in the Fayetteville community!

Andres West heard our story on 104.9 The X with Sunshine on Sunshine in the mornings! She wrote in & submitted Shawn‘s story.......

“Well here goes nothing or something, only you can be the decider of that. This morning on my drive in I heard about you on The X and decided why not give it a shot. There’s so much bad juju in my life there’s gotta be something positive down the line. How to be short and sweet about something that is everything but that. Perhaps my first reason is that if we are not the people you are looking to help you may at the least be able to point us in a direction to find what we need. We are a family in Crisis Mode.

On October 20th last year my husband received a call from the doctor that changed our whole lives and nearly took his life away from us. After suffering 2 weeks of what I suspected was a man cold or a tummy bug we received a call from the doctor telling him to go to the nearest ER as he was actively in renal failure and his kidney’s were not functioning at all. He came into the ER with no idea what was happening or what was going to but with the words RENAL FAILURE hanging over his head. By the next morning we had no more information, no cause that could be easily identified, no reason for this sudden life taking change. From that night forward our entire family changed. Within 2 days me and our girls watched as he nearly coded because the toxins in his body had ready catastrophic levels and had begun to attack his heart. But my husband always has been and always will be a fighter and his heart fought back on it’s on. The paddles were put back away without ever touching his chest. By day 3 he was set up with a chest port and began hemodialysis within the hour of almost having to be shocked back to life. Thus began the journey with hemo 3 days a week, 4 hours per treatment. As the doctor explained it to us they won’t be able to say what’s wrong with his kidney’s until he gets a transplant. From the testing they did they could tell the damage was to far gone to get an answer from a biopsy. They said it was like looking into muddy water trying to make out an image there’s just no way to see at this point. They could say they are abnormally small and have thin lining but not if this was genetic. Basically we gotta get the bad ones out to solve the riddle.

During the first few weeks had it not been for our employers and our family of friends I don’t know how we would have survived. My husband is the Wine Manager at County Line Liquor in Springdale and paired with my boss Tina at Lisle Rutledge and my co-workers they started the Kidney for Shawn West page on ucaring all with the hopes and dreams that we could pull together enough money to get a kidney for my husband. All though everyone’s hearts have been in the right place not many of us have the pocketbooks to back up that kind of wish. You see within 2 months we accumulated $125,000 in medical debt for the hospital stays and they won’t stop coming. We will be getting these bills until the day he has a new kidney. We are at the added disadvantage of being a family without health insurance. We made the decision to forgo health insurance to accomplish the goal of being homeowners and a year and two months after we succeeded in buying a home Shawn is diagnosed with kidney failure. We were able to get him Medicare for ESRD (End Stage Renal Disease) patients without which I don’t doubt I would have lost my husband already. It helps to pay for the treatments but even with the look back that Medicare ESRD allows they fell short of the entire hospital stay. So here we are nearly a year later and losing hope that we can get him on a transplant list. He has been on the phones with most of the hospitals that do transplants in our region and the hold up on getting on most of the list is they want money up front. Money to put you on a list, to wait and hope that your number gets called and they can save your life. The nearer we reach the anniversary the more despair we are all suffering under. My husband doesn’t think he’ll make it past ten years or that we will ever get him on a list and hopefully be able to save him and is sinking further into depression. He hates the treatments. He’s on peritoneal dialysis now which is done at home while he’s sleeping. He now lives with a hose coming out of his belly, a very strict diet, limitations that one wouldn’t expect, and lots and lots of meds 4 times a day. I am now the proud owner of anxiety attacks and more grey hair than any 35 year old should have. But the icing on our cake, in our lives are two girls 12 and 15 years old. They are reason I keep trying and the reason I keep pushing my husband to survive. There’s graduations to go to, wedding isles to walk those girls down, and grandkids somewhere in our future to hold and love. After 17 years of loving with all my heart this one man I can’t imagine my life without him and am looking for any and all help that will keep him here in our lives for the next 60 years.

His name is Shawn West, he’s 38 years old and has a smile that could break your heart and eyes that see way too much. And he’s a damn fine sommelier.“