Illness, work loss, eviction plague family of five

The pandemic has hit Christy and her family hard, but she’s hoping Operation Holiday can come through with a little extra holiday cheer to close out a tough year.

“The past few years, the father of my three children has been sick, and he’s been getting significantly worse,” she said.

“When COVID hit, I got a reduction in pay, along with some hours. I tried to get unemployment relief, but wasn’t approved for that, for whatever reason.”

Working on roughly half of her normal income for several months, Christy said, she and her family started getting behind on bills, and his doctor’s appointments started interfering with his work schedule.

“In August, we finally found a doctor, who figured out he had

Celiac disease the entire time. That explained the hospital visits, and everything else, because everything he’s been eating has literally been killing him, because it has gluten,” she said.

“The problem is, because of the reduction in pay, and he lost his job because he was trying to figure out what was wrong, we called our landlord to inform him that we couldn’t make a payment,” Christy said.

That call eventually led to their landlord and its management company starting eviction proceedings, in early October, on short notice.

“We had three hours to decide. When you have three children, that is not a lot of time, so we decided to leave, to try to protect our renter history,” she said.

“My sister actually was evicted once, and it has followed her around for the past eight years. I didn’t want that on our record, because we would like