Army vet with cancer wants to keep his family off the streets, but he needs help soon
To Dana Connolly, family is everything.
As he sits in a recliner in his two-bedroom apartment in Kendall, he looks lovingly at his 4-year-old son Daniel, who plays with a toy train on the tile floor. His wife, 39-year-old Andrea, watches the two with tears in her eyes.
All Dana wants for Christmas is to keep it this way.
But his rattling cough and sweaty brow tell a different story. Dana Connolly, 61, is battling stage four carcinoma in his nose and throat, chronic kidney disease, a spine deformity and a fractured knee. Explaining his medical history from his chair, he grows upset and coughs into a rag while Andrea rubs olive oil on his chest. Daniel runs from the kitchen with a small container of Vaporub clutched in his tiny hands.
When Dana’s health declined and he decided to move his family from the Cayman Islands to Miami in 2018, he had no way of predicting the cascading medical costs that would befall his family and his bank account.
After a year of struggling to pay the bills at an extended stay hotel near the Miami Executive Airport in Kendall, Operation Sacred Trust — a program aimed at ending homelessness for veteran families in Broward and Miami-Dade Counties — stepped in to secure them an apartment.
But the housing stipends run out in January, and Connolly fears the family will be left homeless for a second time.
“My greatest wish for Christmas would be that I have a place for my wife and son to live,” Dana said. “It’s not curing my cancer. It isn’t about me anymore.”
Aside from the temporary housing assistance from Operation Sacred Trust, the family is surviving off a $541 monthly Social Security check. Dana, born in the Cayman Islands but raised in New Jersey, has permanent residency status in the United States. Andrea and Daniel are not residents, making them ineligible for government housing or food stamps.
The Connolly’s situation prompted Operation Sacred Trust to nominate the family for Wish Book, the annual holiday season initiative by the Miami Herald and el Nuevo Herald to help some of South Florida’s neediest families.
Dana Connolly is an Army veteran, who served five years in Hawaii doing communications. He went into the military partly because he wanted to follow in his father’s Merchant Marine footsteps but mostly “to give back” to the U.S. for furnishing him with an education.
He was discharged from the service in 1979 after he injured his back, so he went back to New Jersey to attend Rutgers University. He moved to the Cayman Islands in 1985 to escape the harsh winters.
He worked various security jobs and after Hurricane Ivan decimated Grand Cayman in 2004, he started his own construction business. Things were on the up-and-up, he said.
“We did very well, and did a lot of charity work,” Dana said. “That was also when I met Andrea.”
Dana met Andrea when he drove by a bus stop and saw her waiting for a ride one day. He stopped and gave her a ride and the couple “hit it off from there.”
Even before Dana got sick, the family had medical crises. At just nine months old Daniel suffered third-degree burns from the neck down in an accident and spent almost a year in the hospital.
While Daniel recovered, Dana was suffering in private. He often coughed up blood but hid it from Andrea.
“I’m a workaholic,” Dana said. “I just go to work and take care of my family.”
One morning he couldn’t hide his illness anymore. He woke up to a bed full of blood and rushed to the hospital. Doctors there told him he had to go to America right away to get better treatment than what they could provide.
After a month of preparation and obtaining visas for Andrea and Daniel, the family left for Miami. A biopsy at Baptist Hospital found stage four cancer in his throat, tonsils and nose, and Dana started chemotherapy three times a week and radiation daily.
He lost weight, his sense of taste and all of his teeth, and suffered grueling side effects like seizures, blood clots, bone weakness and painful, swollen lymph nodes.
Everything happened so fast, he said he didn’t think of going to the U.S. Department of Veteran’s Affairs hospital at the time. As a veteran, he qualifies for care and benefits, but he never followed up with the military to get proper paperwork when he was discharged.
Now he goes to treatments and appointments at the VA in the Jackson Health District, which he gets to from Kendall by taking the bus and then a Metrorail train.
It’s hard for the family to keep up with finances, even now that he’s at the VA. Andrea is undocumented and therefore can’t get a job. Dana has applied for citizenship so she can become a permanent resident by marriage, but the process is long and slow. Dana even got a job himself, but a rainy wait for the bus to take him to a security job at an apartment complex landed him in the hospital with a cold and he had to quit.
All Dana hopes for is enough money to keep them in their apartment, which costs Sacred Trust about $1,700 a month in rent and utilities.
“My greatest concern isn’t about me, it’s about my family,” Dana said, holding back tears. “I desperately don’t want them to be outdoors without a place to live. I can manage everything in my life, but I can’t manage that … I’m really stressed right now.”
HOW TO HELP
Wish Book is trying to help hundreds of families in need this year. To donate, pay securely at MiamiHerald.com/wishbook. For information, call 305-376-2906 or email wishbook@miamiherald.com. (The most requested items are often laptops and tablets for school, furniture, and accessible vans.) Read more at MiamiHerald.com/wishbook.