Help pay for brain surgery to save my brother’s life

6 min readJan 20, 2021

Who am I:

My name is Mick Thanakrit Thongfa, and I am writing this please for help for my brother.

Who is this Fundraiser for:

Mr. Jumlong Nasuansathit (nickname: Long), is 24 years old, has a 3-year-old daughter Kanyarat, and his wife Pornthip is three months pregnant with their second child. Long has four siblings: three brothers, and one sister, and is the third born in the family.

Long was born to the small ethnic Karen Poe community of Kanchanaburi Thailand (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanchanaburi), in the remote village of Klity Creek. In 2014, the population of the community only had 1,999 people. Long and his family makes his living as a farmer.

What happened to Long:

On the evening of January 14, 2021, Long suffered a near-fatal accident as he and his brother were cutting down a perennial tree to prevent it from falling into his home in the future. While the cut was being made, a large tree branch fell and hit the right side of Long’s skull, the violent strike made Long fall unconscious immediately.

Until now, at the time of this writing on 21 January 2021, he still hasn’t woken from his coma.

After the branch struck Long, his brother frantically called for help from the community to help him get his brother to the district hospital. Arriving at the District Hospital, the staff there decided it would be best to send Long to the better equipped provincial hospital.

It took more than five hours to travel from the remote village to the provincial hospital. Once there, Long was rushed into surgery where the doctors performed cranial surgery. During this surgery, they removed the bone fragment of his skull that had pricked Long’s brain and closed the skull. Long was then placed into an induced coma for two days. At this time, Long’s brain is still bleeding (bleeding more than expected) and he has high fever all the time; over the next four days, Long still does not wake up.

I, Mick, as the eldest brother, have been driving back and forth from my home in Chiang Mai since the first day of the accident, and have been observing the symptoms and feeling helpless, and so I consulted with my brother’s doctor and the hospital to try to identify another hospital where he can be seen and treated by a brain specialist.

Finally, we found a private hospital in Nakhon Pathom where there was bed space and a specialist that could see Long.

We moved Long on January 18th. Now after the move, the specialist has discussed the symptoms and listened to the prior doctor’s advice. In conclusion, a new surgery is the best choice recommended by Long’s new doctor.

Reasons to go to a private hospital:

Along with my brother and sister, we took turns day and night to watch over my brother. We didn’t get much sleep during this time because we were struggling all the time, feeling very tormented for our brother, without really being able to do anything; but I understood the treatment would cost 30 baht gold a day. Long was another patent in a ward filled with people who had a wide variety of diseases, that is not very strange or unusual.

But to have him in this environment in a coma with dozens of other patients; it makes me worry about infection. In addition to the brain swelling, and the bleeding that was continuous, there was a very high amount of urine being produced — more than usual and over four days, he still had not awaken. So we called hospitals in the western region almost everywhere, and finally the only place that could take him was Bangkok Hospital, Nakhon Pathom Province, a private hospital.

Whereas the provincial hospital charged only 30 baht (US $1), this new private hospital will charge more than a thousand times that amount — with expensive hospitalization fees. Even with insurance coverage, only the first 30,000 baht will be paid by insurance, but after that each subsequent payment must be made in cash.

We do not have the capacity to pay this because we are only farmers who grow crops such as corn, pumpkin and rice.

This is why we need to ask for everyone’s help.

As Long’s eldest brother. We grew up together during my early childhood’s days. But later, when I was 10 years old, I was moved to Bangkok to live with my grandmother who sponsored my education. I graduated from college and went to work in Chiang Mai. From early adulthood, most of my reunions with my family occurred when I would travel home to the village.

Returning home is to return to work to help the community — which if many people know the Klity community it is filled with stories of community struggles, stories about village hardships, and stories of the restoration of the Klity Creek. Until now, these hardships in the village are not over. I’ve been trying to help my community for the last six years and getting back to work in my own community is not only a duty, but also a way of life for me.

Each year I rarely go back home, but since taking on a role to help my community, this has allowed me to go home from Chiang Mai to Klity almost every few months. Through my work, I am able to meet with my family — even if each meeting is not long, I am thankful that I am able to spend a few hours with them. Most of my work is now with the wider community, farther away, and they too have the same problems in Klity.

For the last six years, I am happy to have contributed to many communities. I did it with love because it made me happy to help my village, helping all the surrounding affected communities — even though I sometimes feel my role didn’t help much.

Over the six years that I have been doing my job, working for the communities, I sometimes forget that I still have a family to look after. I’ve worked so hard for my community, and doing the social work I love so much, but I don’t feel that, as the eldest brother, I’ve helped my family as much as I should.

While there are times my parents find my work concerning and worrying, but my younger brother, Long, has always been very supportive of my work. Each time that my team and I (the organization and the people who support Klity) need to travel to Klity, we always would stay at my brother’s house — Long and his wife have always been welcoming to everyone on my team. Whether it’s a small task, or a big task, every time we asked for help, Long would respond.

I’m going to need some strength. Long is one of those people who would come to the aid of the local youth for many years, until he had his own family.

So on this day, the day when my family really needs help, I am asking for permission to use this space to inform society that I am dedicating all the strength I have to my brother to be healed, healthy, and as normal as possible as soon as possible, and at this point, my greatest wish is for my brother to wake up.

Despite the hospital assessing the total cost to be enormous, I feel it is still not as much as what I have devoted to the community and society. I am not expecting anything back in return from society, but just this time, I hope to gather empathy and understanding from the society that I have dedicated myself to.

I’m still standing strong, fighting for the society and people that I love. I continue to work for the community, for the environment, for human rights, because this is my passion and I am happy doing everything I am doing — and because of my duty to do the best for my family. Because the community is the driving force for me I post this plea for help.