Support Gabbi’s Fight Against EDS POTS MCAS and many others

Product Description

My name is Katie Haakenstad, and I would like to introduce you to my friend Gabbi Miles. If you already know Gabbi, then you know that she exudes life, joy, love, compassion, and hope.

Since Gabbi was a young girl, a series of strange, seemingly random symptoms have caused difficulty in her life. However, Gabbi is incredibly tenacious and did not allow those things to stop her from being a two-sport college athlete, a competitive equestrian, and a brilliant nursing student. Gabbi has trained her own service dog to help her navigate more challenging days. She then used her entrepreneurial spirit to start her service dog training business, allowing her compassionate servant heart to thrive while working with animals and people who desperately needed and sought those animals’ support. She began this business during full-time nursing school, while still working other jobs to help pay the way.

In the last couple of years, Gabbi’s myriad conditions have brought life as she knew it to a screeching halt. Today, May 27th 2025, Gabbi and I are in the emergency room for at least her fifth trip this week in hopes of receiving the pain treatment she desperately needs and has been fighting months to attain and get under control.
The level and location of pain is akin to being in full-term labor.

Gabbi was diagnosed in 2022 with POTS syndrome. Since then, she has also learned that she suffers from Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome , MCAS , CD-19 B cell deficiency, endometriosis, and most recently, gastroparesis. Severe pain is causing rapid drops in blood pressure with a sharp rise in heart rate leading to uncontrolled seizures. More information about these conditions and how they affect each other can be found by clicking the highlighted text above.

In the spring quarter of 2025, Gabbi was forced to leave school as she could not keep up with the workload or attend classes due to severe chronic and persistently unrelenting pain. Gabbi’s body that once performed amazing athletic feats now spends much of its time writhing in pain, unable to find any comfortable position to alleviate her grief. This is all to say nothing of the incredibly systemic, discriminatory injustice of a strained and broken medical system she has become almost a professional at navigating. When Gabbi is in her appointments, oftentimes she is self-diagnosing while her specialists look at her with disbelief and take notes, stating that they will look into it. Many months later, they return with the exact diagnosis that Gabbi mentioned at the start of their meeting.

There are treatment centers that have teams of specialists who are experts in all of these comorbid conditions, and it has become abundantly clear that Washington state does not offer the level of care, precision, or understanding of these conditions that are required in order to not only improve but probably save Gabbi’s life.
We are asking and praying for 10,000, which is the starting cost of treatment in multiple POTS and EDS specialty clinics in other states. At this time, she is considering temporarily relocating to Arizona as their program seems to be the most effective, well-researched, and complete. This will require an additional amount that we can’t yet know, as she will probably have to live there while getting that treatment unless a virtual option is available.

If you are in a position to give financial support, Gabbi and her family will be eternally grateful. At 23 years old, she is about 700,000 in medical debt. You are already in our prayers as we have been seeking God’s wisdom on how to proceed and find immediate or near-future relief for this uncontrollable, devastating list of diagnoses. At this time, none of these conditions are curable, but I believe with everything in my heart that Gabbi, who is already incredibly knowledgeable and has now done many hundreds, if not thousands, of hours of research on her own conditions, will in the next decade or less be considered an authority on these conditions. We have already begun building an informative website where she will be sharing her story, and if you know anyone who suffers from any of these conditions, please reach out to us because at this point, we have done so much groundwork that other people should be able to benefit from it as well.

Thank you for your time. I know people are busy, and I know how hard it is to read a story this gut-wrenching, but I’m sure you can imagine that it is infinitely harder being Gabbi and living it out every single day until something changes.

Organizers :

Katie Allen Haakenstad is organizing this fundraiser.