Hello, my name is Jeremy Bolin. My lovely wife of 24 years, awesome 15-year-old daughter and I live in Pendleton, Indiana. Until a little over three years ago I was a seemingly healthy, 45-year-old, Environmental Science and Engineering Consultant who enjoyed outdoor activities, playing guitar and was avid about fitness/weight training.

What began as a typical morning on September 21, 2021, turned out to be a day that changed our lives forever. Prior to heading to a late morning meeting, I first headed to my local gym to grab a weight-training workout. After about an hour of a moderately intense workout, I started to feel unusually bad.

Due to a throbbing headache and overall “swimmy headed” feeling, I headed home. The discombobulation quickly escalated to full-on dizziness, intense pain that felt like an ice pick being shoved through the back of my head, soon accompanied by vomiting, severe ringing in my ears, blurred vision, and the inability to move.

Thank God my wife was working from her home office and called 911. Upon delivery to the emergency room with a life-threatening blood pressure of 285/105 and completion of several diagnostic tests and scans, it was determined I was having a hemorrhagic stroke (brain bleed) in my cerebellum.

After emergency brain surgery and a little more than a month worth of hospital stays (ICU to rehab hospital), I returned home with both visible and non-visible deficits that rendered the end of my “normal” life as I had known it; including a career and the income that came with it.

My initial recovery which included countless physiological challenges and therapies, was further complicated by having to navigate how to move forward with newfound financial obstacles. These included things like trying to obtain approval for social security disability and plan for typical AND new expenses without losing all assets on our new, much lower family income…not to mention our long-term strategy like planning for our daughter’s education and my wife’s wanting to retire at some point in her life.

It seemed to me that most charities and non-profit organizations associated with medical conditions deal a lot with raising money for research and/or finding cures. Over the course of my recovery process, I have encountered many folks who suffered a similar trauma that has severely shaken their lives physically, mentally, emotionally, and most definitely financially. This gap made me feel like there was a need for an organization that focuses on immediate non-medical needs of survivors; especially for those in which the incident occurred during their prime earning years. Folks who have suffered the sort of thing that happened to me at a time when earning potential is at its highest are left with many things left to plan for and pay for, with less ability to do so. In short, they have a lot of UNFINISHED BUSINESS.