Ed Brayton, of Dispatches from the Culture Wars and co-founder of the Freethought Blogs network, had a bad and scary health episode this week, which resulted in him being hospitalized and having his chest cracked open. In his words:

So, Black and Decker to the sternum and they are shocked to find a ton of fluid in my chest, pushing down on my heart and lungs and making my heart go into overdrive to keep oxygen in my system. They do a biopsy on the lymph nodes, clean things up, install three chest tubes and sew me back up. Sometime in the middle of the night, I ripped out my ventilator tube (I told them that better not be on my bill, I did it myself). As for what caused all of this, that’s still not certain.

More details on his blog.

He’s going to be okay — but he’s going to have a longish recovery period, and he needs help. Again in his words:

The good news is that I have health insurance, which I pay on a COBRA from my job with AINN (it runs out in six months and I’ll have to get my own insurance, which thankfully can’t be denied anymore because of the preexisting condition). But I’m still going to have some significant out-of-pocket expenses and loss of income during the recovery period (it’s going to be a couple months before I’m really back to normal). So you can certainly help out financially if you have the means to do so and it would be greatly appreciated.

If you can help Ed get through this without having to add money worries to the stress of recovery, details on how to help are here.

I know there were a lot of people who wanted to contribute when I did my cancer fundraiser, but who didn’t hear about it until I’d raised enough money and stopped the campaign. If any of you still feel inspired to help me out — please help Ed. Ed is pretty much why Freethought Blogs exists: he co-founded it, and he keeps it running every day. Helping him helps me, and it helps everyone else in this network, and it helps everyone who finds this network valuable. Please help if you can. Thanks.