05/07/2019

Help Pauline Anna Strom

Friends,

We’re writing on behalf of a friend: musician and remote healer Pauline Anna Strom (Paula). Paula is visually impaired (blind since birth), elderly (in her 60s), and lives in a rent-controlled apartment in the Tenderloin District of San Francisco with her two reptiles, Little Soulstice and Miss Huff. Since the 70s this apartment has been the center of Paula’s universe, and is the very place where Trans-Millenia Music , a collection of her sound explorations from the 80s that RVNG released in 2017, was conceived and recorded. 

Paula recently fractured a part of her hip after falling over some furniture on her apartment balcony. She crawled, with her twenty pound cyclura iguana in her arms, back into the apartment to call for an ambulance. Paula was admitted to a hospital where she had a successful surgery followed by almost a month at Jewish Home & Rehab Center, but was returned to her apartment last week when her appeal for additional rehabilitation time was rejected. She is slowly regaining her physical faculties, though is in an immense amount of pain. This pain was very recently amplified by the sudden / shocking passing of a close friend and caretaker. 

Paula is essentially – and fiercely – an independent person. Her insurance covered a part of her rehab, but now she is contending with the cost of additional hospital billing, in home physical therapy visits, and general living expenses. While Paula would much prefer to cover accumulating bills through her healing practice fees, her condition, recovery, and the (necessary) professional assessments / disruptions do not make that an immediately solvent solution.

With Paula’s permission, we’ve set up a GoFundMe page to help offset these bills (her insurance only covered $28 of the ambulance bill, to provide some perspective) and living expenses for the next few months.

Just before her accident, Paula was composing new music for the first time in decades. We are anticipating some of that music to arrive to our Brooklyn headquarters soon, and depending on her comfort level, offering some of it immediately on Bandcamp to help raise some financial support and awareness to Paula’s predicament.

We are also looking for volunteers in the Bay Area who may be able to contribute some time to her mutual care calendar. Almost more pressing than financial aid and in the absence of her trusted friend’s passing, Paula needs help with lifting / carrying dishes and groceries, feeding the reptiles (we’ve met them; they are sweethearts), sorting the mail, reading digital displays on her synthesizers and phone. It would be any day of the week after 2 pm. Paula is a reiki master and is able to offer sessions in exchange for help around her apartment.

Thank you so much for consideration. It means the world to Paula, and to us.

RVNG Intl.
https://www.gofundme.com/pauline-anna-strom-recovery