I did everything right.I started a company at 26 with nothing but a problem I needed solved: I wanted to print something in my neighborhood and couldn’t find anywhere to do it. That simple frustration became PrintWithMe — now a nationwide network of thousands of public printers, more than 100 employees, and a business I’m genuinely proud of. I moved from Chicago to Scottsdale during COVID, like millions of other millennials who finally did the math and realized our dollars could go further in the Sun Belt.We got more space, we enrolled our daughter into a good school. Things were really looking up.’
Then, two years ago, a growth started bleeding in my brain.My surgeon told me I had a narrow window — a few months — to get the procedure done or the consequences could be fatal. I had health insurance. Good health insurance, I thought. But my insurer refused to cover the specialist I’d been referred to. For weeks, I fought them — appealing, documenting, re-appealing — while a clock ticked in my skull.
I eventually had to change my insurance. I got the surgery. I’m here to tell the story. But I spent a lot of time in that hospital bed thinking about how many people don’t survive that fight.
