(Guest Lecture): May 2022- Overcoming Financial Burden

Hello, my name is Diana Valentine. I'm the financial coach for the myeloma crowd by HealthTreat. In 2002, my husband was diagnosed with MGUS and he was treated for actually non-Hodgkin's lymphoma until he was actually diagnosed with multiple myeloma several years later. And during this entire, his entire treatment process, I realized there were things that were falling through the holes. Me advocating for him when I had questions and actually trying to figure out how we're going to pay for this because the first thing when we heard cancer, cancer, cancers, we're not going to be able to take care of this. We had two kids in high school and going to be going to college and it was a huge setback for our plans. I'm sure this happens to everyone who's diagnosed. And so in 2020, Jenny Ostrom brought me aboard with the myeloma crowd and it's been the biggest blessing of my life. If anything came out of death, my husband is me being able to help other people. And one of those things, because I grew up in a very, very poor environment, I call myself subterranean poor. We had most of the time no water. We didn't have running water in our house. We had food that we were getting from scraps from grocery stores thrown out and we would go through lettuce on the grass to find food to eat. And I know things like this could be challenging for everybody. A lot of times we walk by people and we think that everything's okay. We talk to patients, other patients that are in the waiting room. We think everything's okay, but we hide things. And in our society, financial issues are things we hide because everybody's judged by how they are financially. And I vowed I would never do that. I grew up in that environment and I was not going to do that to anyone else. And my husband's disease gave me an opportunity to help other people. He saved and he worked a lot and so did I. And we were blessed with the opportunity to not have the financial issues other people may have. And I want to offer the opportunity to other people to be able to not be financially toxic, to give them opportunities to understand what questions to ask their doctors, what questions to ask all their health team and find out whatever, what resources are out there available to them. I can help people with insurances, ask them a question about insurances, what best insurance to get in your state. We can go over life insurances that can be very beneficial for taking care of treatment later on in your treatment progress. I can help you with looking at your assets. Right now, it's a big thing with inflation. You've seen assets deplete 30-40 percent and that may be ongoing for quite a period of time. So my goal and the other financial coaches we have, fortunately, we have four of the financial coaches and they're wonderful. They come from different backgrounds. Some of them, most of them are patients themselves. And so they understand the difficulty that patients go through with cancer and the cost associated with it. Cancer is in fact the most costly disease on the face of the planet and we don't see those costs coming down. With new novel treatments coming out like CAR T-cell treatments, those treatments can be $438,000 for one single injection. It's very expensive and so for those people who are uninsured or underinsured, that is a very big challenge. So I encourage you to call myself Diana Valentine with the Health Free F4 Coach or call John Borland, Nancy Brimhall, Marty Singer or Patrick Kelly. We would all be glad to sit down and talk to you about the issues you have. And while you're there, educate yourself on myeloma. Educate yourself on what your treatment is going to be because when you find out the treatment costs associated with it, you'll be more capable of taking care of yourself. We want to empower you to help yourself. Please give us a call. Get on Health Free. Educate yourself. That's the best thing you can do for you and your family. Thank you.