The recovery of Jasiel Favors

High school football, crowdfunding, and a family's battle for healthcare in the heart of Texas.

Jasiel Favors was motionless on the ground for 20 minutes. In the stands, classmates kept their hands over their mouths, fingers pressed together above their noses. On both sidelines, players went down to a knee; some bowed their heads. Someone prayed loudly, her voice lifting above the heavy silence while Jasiel lay prostrate on the field, waiting for an ambulance and a diagnosis.

It was Sept. 2, 2015, but there was no sign of autumn. At 7 p.m. it was still 89 degrees. Jasiel was playing special teams on a kickoff for Stony Point High that night. The ball went up then down, and Jasiel, a scrappy member of the junior varsity team, aimed for the Harker Heights player carrying the ball. “I remember every moment of that play,” Jasiel says.

He remembers running down the field, the ball in the opponent's hands. He remembers making it to the ball-carrier ahead of his teammates and doing his job, bringing his opponent down to the ground to stop the play. “The tackle wasn’t the best,” he says, “but I made it, and then I couldn’t get up.”

Debra Favors, Jasiel’s mom, didn’t realize just how serious her son’s injury was until well after he came out of the first surgery. She hadn’t been at the football game where he was injured; she was at home sick. The football coach called her, and she met them at the field. Jasiel was still on the ground by the time she got there.

Her 16-year-old son, a sophomore, had a broken spine. Jasiel was in surgery for six hours, and the surgeon had found three broken vertebrae. He had been immediately paralyzed.

“The day it finally hit me was probably three weeks after we got there,” Debra says. While she was at the hospital with Jasiel, a stranger asked her if her son was dying. “All I had been thinking about was that most kids survive this injury. I was thinking about how he was just gonna walk out of there.”

Jasiel made it through the surgeries, but that was only the beginning of the Favors family’s struggle. There was still the recovery, the return, and several transitions to come. All of those things take stamina and grit and determination, but they also cost money: money no one in the Favors family expected to spend.

The Favors live in Round Rock, Texas, a conservative city just north of Austin in the middle of a conservative state that continues to slash programs that help families pay for healthcare. That’s put Texas, and the Favors family, in the same position as a growing wave of Americans who turn to crowdfunding medical care. The effort to give Jasiel a normal life has been costly. Even with insurance and crowd-funded support, the Favors family hasn’t been able to make ends meet on its own. Debra's son’s life is worth everything to her. Sometimes that feels like exactly how much she has had to give.

There are few things a 16-year-old wants more than a set of car keys. The car that thrilled Jasiel was a 2015 Dodge Caravan: a giant black van with a ramp for his wheelchair.

After the surgeries and the hospital, Jasiel still felt stuck. He was immobile on his own and dependent on live-in assistance to help him recover. He couldn’t just get into a friend’s car and zip off to the mall. If Jasiel — whose friends call him "Jay," an abbreviation of his name which is pronounced Jay-zel — wanted to go somewhere, even to the hospital for physical therapy, the family had to call a company a couple of days in advance to transport him.

Courtesy of the Favors family/illustration by Tyson Whiting

At home, Jasiel has nurses who help him. “Before the injury, I cooked my own meals,” Jasiel says. “I used the restroom by myself.” That’s been the hardest thing, Jasiel says: dealing with that reliance on other people.

These inconveniences are annoying for Jasiel, but they’re also expensive.

Texas is proud of its conservative values. As a state, Texas generally votes for small government. Williamson County, where Jasiel lives, stayed red in the 2016 election, going 51.3 percent for Donald Trump. According to a poll done by the University of Texas and the Texas Tribune, 52 percent of surveyed Texans think the Affordable Care Act should be repealed, and 30 percent think it should be repealed and not replaced at all.

After Trump’s election, the state government was emboldened to cut $1 billion in state funding for Medicaid, a program that the family says would have served Jasiel. In doing so, they forfeited another $1.4 billion in federal funding. Texas’ cuts removed $350 million from Medicaid pay for therapists, including physical and occupational therapists like the ones Jasiel would need.

Everything to make Jasiel healthy again cost money. Ninety days in a hospital cost money. So did the tracheotomy, the heart monitor, and the nurses who attended to him. When the Favors found themselves out of options, they turned to crowdfunding. A family friend had already set up one crowdfunding page to help his family pay for medical bills before the complication when Jasiel first got injured. As of publication, 143 people, including the Round Rock Football Booster Club, had donated $7,758 to that cause.

According to Gridiron Heroes, a Texas-based nonprofit foundation helping high school football players with spinal cord injuries, Texas high school football players (including Jasiel) have suffered 26 documented paralyzing injuries since 2003. Many high school athletes who get injured in Texas turn to fundraising sites.

Grant Milton, a senior at The Woodlands High School near Houston, set up a page to pay for life-saving surgery after suffering an on-field injury in Nov. 2016. There are GoFundMe pages for high-school-sport-related spinal injuries, dislocated knee caps, torn shoulder tendons, brain bleeds, and more.

Those pages are part of a national trend to use crowdfunding for medical care payments. NerdWallet found that nearly half of the $2 billion raised by GoFundMe campaigns over a studied period were medical-related. For YouCaring and GiveForward, that number jumped to 70 percent of their combined $800 million in donations. A University of Washington Bothell study found that personal medical campaigns were more likely to come from states that chose not to expand Medicaid under the ACA, Texas especially. Via Bloomberg:

"We had a huge number of campaigns from Texas, which is often recognized as the state where it's most difficult to qualify for Medicaid and other public insurance," Professor Nora Kenworthy, co-author of the study, said. "A lot of the campaigns are really using GoFundMe as a safety net," asking for "help with lost wages, help getting basic health-care services and support."

The help is significant, but it’s not always enough. Debra says the medical bills she has left to pay are currently hovering close to $100,000.

Jasiel is her youngest of four, and money wasn’t the easiest for them. But she says they were managing before his injury. Debra was working as a team leader for Schlotzsky's Deli, a sandwich shop. She had health insurance, and her ex-partner also had insurance. And yet, according to Debra, their bills from Jasiel’s treatment were almost impossible to pay. “My insurance barely paid for half of the medical bills,” she says. “Much less anything else.”

Debra took unpaid time off from her job to stay with Jasiel the 90 days while he was in the hospital, showing up to work at the end of every week to make sure she could keep her job after he was released. Jasiel's father quit his job in Dec. 2015, and Debra lost her job in March 2016 when she took time off to be with Jasiel when he was re-hospitalized due to complications. Jasiel’s parents, separated and never married, were without insurance at the same time.

(Debra doesn’t know why Jasiel’s father quit his job, and he was unreachable for comment. Jasiel says his father claims that they were never without insurance; that it was a miscommunication.)

“They wanted me to make a decision: my son or them,” Debra says about her employers. “Obviously I chose my son. I needed to be there with him no matter what.

“It felt like a dead end.”

Courtesy of the Favors family/illustration by Tyson Whiting

In July of 2016, another GoFundMe was set up, this time to raise money specifically to transport Jasiel to his appointments and sometimes even to the mall to hang with his friends. The family raised just under $25,000 and then a local construction company, Wheeler, generously agreed to cover the remaining $29,000 to buy the Favors family the Dodge Caravan.

Local news sites showed a rally for Jasiel held in the parking lot of the school right behind the football stadium — students crowded around the shiny new van. The story was, after all, heartwarming: a community rallying around one of its own to make sure that he could have independence and freedom.

“(The fundraiser pages) have helped pay for rent and the lights and helped pay for the medication,” Debra said. “I’m not sure how we would have made this all work without them.”

The Favors have been fortunate. In a piece for Esquire, Luke O’Neil wrote about how these sites became major players in the healthcare world and how biased those campaigns can be against people of color and people who haven’t built a relatable and personable story. Whether or not your story goes viral, he argues, can determine whether or not a family can pay its medical expenses and (in some cases) whether or not a patient survives.

The van gives Jasiel freedom. “It was a relief,” he says. “Knowing that so many people are willing to help me and my mom.”

Jasiel doesn’t remember much about what happened after he was put into the ambulance and driven to the hospital. All he really remembers is that he went into surgery, and when he woke up all of his friends were there. Time, he says, moved unbelievably slowly when he was awake and too fast to count when he slept, which was often. “That time was the roughest,” Jasiel says. “I was still in good spirits, but I just wasn’t myself. I was just thinking why did this happen to me? Will I be able to return after this?”

Almost two years since his injury, Jasiel is at the beginning of what is still looking to be a lengthy recovery process. The doctors are hopeful, and so far, Jasiel does seem to be returning to normal. Hopefully this summer, after he takes the Texas standardized tests, Jasiel will go to a rehab facility to work on his range of motion. That too will cost money, but Jasiel needs it. He says he’s excited because he’s starting to get “a tingly feeling” a little bit at the bottom of his feet.

Jasiel has just started his senior year of high school. He will probably have to do some form of physical therapy for the next 10 years of his life, at least. If recovery goes as well as he hopes it will, one day this injury will be a distant memory.

Courtesy of the Favors family/illustration by Tyson Whiting

“He can move his fingers if he thinks about it,” Debra says. “But we’ve still got a long way to go. I have no idea how long this is gonna take, but he’s trying.”

It’s uncertain how long the Favors family will have to think about what it cost them. Jasiel says he is back on his father’s insurance, which is helping a lot to pay for his medical expenses and his rehab. But even though Debra says it’s “good insurance,” there’s still a lot left to pay. She can only ask for so much charity. And as generous as Texans can be, they continue to vote to repeal programs that could crowd-fund Jasiel's recovery through taxpayer money.

Jasiel still needs lots of tests, caregivers, and attention. “I never know how bad the bills are going to be until I open them,” Debra says. But they’re never as cheap as they need to be.

Jasiel gets a little bit better every day. That debt also gets a little bit worse.