The US Healthcare system murdered him. Goddamn America.

Never knew them besides seeing their comments on art which shows up in

Glancing comments on their profile and I'm seeing people blaming the US healthcare system. I wonder what happened

My general consensus, is that he had been bullied by long covid, and left vulnerable to a fungal infection to the lungs. The US healthcare system sent him on a run around with nothing to show for it but bills, until he passed just recently. It's unfortunately just going to be a really common story for the next while. Hell hospitals here in the US are still over-run and understaffed from covid stress.

I think the posted screenshots sound like he got charged 27,000$ for a lung visit. Whether it was covid(?) / Cancer(?) / Lung cancer(?) / Lung infection(?) or a rare disease i'll never know.

But it seems morbid that he actually thought about death before he passed away.

it's probably the wrong time but yeah a lot in 2024 has passed around. It's a very complex issue for a lot of people, it sounded like he was a friend to many but also wanting a positive appearance for the furry fandom in general, might have scrubbed or hid a lot under the rug.

But also at the same time, like i don't know one of my older friends like Brim the Eevee/Tavix had with him, but i noticed many of my older friends seemed to be, bizarrely, like staring me on the eye of Dragoneer's front page, the two black and white eevees seeming drawn together.

Honestly i know we brush a lot under the rug and life is.. well like life is just..

life is like dio's steam roller.

And it's running a lot of people over.

Even if our ocs are 12 inch sticks 58,385 feet high elder gods who could eat steam rollers for breakfast.

Guy sounded like he dedicated his life to trying to ensure Furaffinity and the furry fandom in general was a welcoming place, apparently did his best to welcome everyone in, ask what artists and community and con members wanted, and sounded active in con life(???) and also playing with a lot of people and checking in on people.

He sounded like he played with a lot of people, tried to hang out with everyone, and also went through a life where skimming through 2 weeks of his twitter socials.

It sounds like he grew up a life where he describes being bullied at school in alabama on a first meet, punished for 'instigating' a student hurling a brick on him on a first meet.

He had opinions, he was a human being, not a npc, he detested musk and trump, he liked furry arts and cons, very pro lgbtq, he seemed to go on or off the deep end at times.

It's still not quite entirely clear if his passing was entirely unintentional or not. He had thoughts of walking in front of a train before he passed. And although he owned furaffinity, his finances / health insurance is unclear. I'm not sure if he had the 27k or not but it seemed his first thought was the train, not a gofundme or any leverage.

Maybe he wanted to go out(?), maybe he was failed by the system, i don't know, 27k is 27k, but i don't know his finances.

One things a morbid experiment i saw 4-8 weeks ago by then innocent chance was like a test Wild Rats and Pet rats were put into a water bucket.

o Wild rats, when put into a bucket of water, and left to drown, looked for a escape, then tried to swim to the surface. When none arrived, they simply stopped moving, and passed after 1 minute without a fight.

o Pet rats, when put in the same conditions, would look for their owners, anywhere from 3-18 minutes. Most owners wouldn't let their pets drown though and would never get to the full length.

- However, if a scientist saved a wild rat before it drowned, it's swimming duration would also go up from the 1->18 minutes.

Unfortunately the test was about understanding hope, resilience, and human depression with the rats so the only ones that survived were the pet rats or Rodents the experiment runners felt most sorry for, and cared about keeping.

The rest just floated away.

It was a bit morbid, but i kinda wonder, in kinda a sad/ reality check down kind of way.

Did Dragoneer succumb against his desires, or did he choose to go out that way? He definitely seemed like a spark of life for the furry community and seemed to have been sparky up until tommarow. But his thoughts went way down after that one 27k bill/tweet.

Was he in the red, forgoing medical insurance/savings, to put everything he could into furaffinity as his project/dream?

Could he have had like a million or friends he could called upon to pay, but skipped out on it.

Did the doctor fail a time critical injury?

However you go, 2024 has been a year, some people have infought, faded, bitter or drifted away, others dissapear, journals are filling up with month after month of artists failing to pay the bills and also customers or former friends having breakups/feeling jaded / feeling like beaten records/ atms / trust issues / burned bridges / walking away, etc.

I have no idea if he just kept pouring, pouring, pouring, and maybe got exhausted and just one day gave up, or if he did want to live, but a terrible illness took over him.

But there wasn't any "gofundme: Dragoneer, owner of Furaffinity needs your help!"

he just... seemed to slip into the water. And then he was gone. For good.

The most recent tweet shown regarding bills was that it had been re-estimated to 1.6k, which is still highway robbery but way less of one. Still though, it seems like his condition was very progressed and perhaps there wasn't much that could be done, and nobody wanted to be the guy to break the news, leaving it to Dragoneer to kinda figure it out for himself. It's heart-wrenching.

Also, his provider that was giving the estimates is the same one that has sued patients for unpaid medical bills and sought to repossess everything they owned due to their high prices, so honestly, screw UVA in particular.

Yeah honestly. US healthcare should be life saving treatment, not like a dystopian money extracting hell hole, holy christ.

Yeah, sadly his final updates have the kind of aura that he was likely being charged thousands for diagnosis and else when he was already terminal but nobody wanted to tell him that. :-/ And it's quite possible that it was the fault of him not having been able to afford to see anyone sooner due to the huge cost of even basic healthcare without insurance, so in the end they still got his money but he passed away.

Similarly when my estranged late father was dying from metastasized stomach cancer (not in the US), his doctor actually referred him to an oncologist with a hopeful notion, though the oncologist literally bumped him back to the hospital ward without even seeing him because of "Why is he being sent here? I can't do anything, he's going to die and needs end-of-life care instead."

Yeah, it's rough to be the one to come out and say it. Some people don't have the heart to break the news. Lost my old dog in a similar case where he was probably on death's road but the vet wanted to employ a "wait and see" approach. Rather than allowing him to pass peacefully in the vet's office, we had to watch him die in our arms while we were begging him to stay with us. It would have been better had he been given a chance to skip the pain, but we were following the vet's advice cause we had a hope. I think that oncologist did the right thing by being honest, even though it was a bitter pill to swallow.

Thanks for typing out this heartfelt comment.

It should provide some insight to what happened for other people who share my question.

The us systems really are awful in a lot of ways, healthcare is straight up a scam, which is shameful.
Their passing is very sad and probably could have been avoided with the right structures.

FA and the people I met there are the reason I'm still doing art at all, with the support and many inspirations, so even though I don't know them directly I know they're part of the reason I'm where I am now as well. Rest in peace.