- April 24, 2024
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Jonathan Raney was desperate. His wife had left him, he was deeply in debt, and the best work he could find consisted of two part-time jobs — one delivering auto parts, the other delivering pizza. In March 2014, while walking on a kitchen floor at the pizza restaurant that he didn’t realize was still wet from a recent mopping, he slipped and fell on his back. Hard.
The injury complicated an old motorcycle injury, but that was the least of his problems. Further tests revealed a growth on his right kidney.
“I thank God every day for that fall,” Raney said while sitting at the dining room table in his immaculately clean home in Palm Coast. “I might have gone years without knowing I had cancer.”
Raney is a tall, stout man with an apostolic beard, a bald forehead and a high-pitched, contagious laugh. He has been through three marriages, a cocaine addiction and financial ruin, but he is always positive as he looks to the next phase of his life. And that next phase is to tell his story to the community, in hopes of raising awareness and funds for the people who helped him.
‘THIS IS CANCER’
After his diagnosis of cancer, Raney got a call from a woman he knew from church, First Methodist Church of Bunnell, where he sings in the choir and volunteers at the homeless shelter. Her name was Faith Coleman.
“She said, ‘We’ve got to meet,’” Raney recalled. Coleman was the co-founder of the Flagler County Free Clinic, which offers medical help to those who qualify in the county. She helped impress upon him that he had to act fast. “I said, ‘I can’t do it today. How about Friday?’ She said, ‘No, you come in now. This is cancer.’ She just shepherded me through the process of getting started on treatment.”
As a former stockbroker, Raney was comfortable making phone calls. And he learned that he would need every bit of the tenacity he had developed in the financial world. He learned that his treatments would cost over $100,000, and he was going to have to work every angle of the system to get help paying for them.
He networked with doctors at Florida Hospital Flagler and applied for grants, but complications with his heart made his surgery particularly risky, and he couldn’t get the final paperwork approved.
The summer came and went. His wife, who had left him a few months earlier, finalized the divorce and quickly was remarried. He felt that his life was falling apart all around him.
Halloween and Thanksgiving passed by. Still, no surgery was scheduled to address his cancer.
“I worried about it every day, hoping my phone would ring,” Raney said. He added: “I’d go a month or two between tests, not knowing what was going on. I’d make follow-up call after call, making myself a pain the neck. … But the length of time wore on me.”
EXPANSION MODE
In addition to Coleman — who died after her own battle with cancer on Nov. 30, 10 years after co-founding the Free Clinic — Raney also made another good friend: Dr. Stephen Bickel.
Bickel is a proper, thin man with gray hair and an enthusiasm for health care that brought him back to the field for free even after he retired from his career in Los Angeles. He has a vision for the Free Clinic that sees a major expansion of the services offered to the community.
The hallways of the Free Clinic, located at 703 E. Moody Blvd., in Bunnell, are littered with trashcans to catch water from the leaky roof. In the treatment rooms, the filing cabinets are mismatched, and the vinyl chairs are torn. But these humble offices are hallowed for the patients and doctors alike.
“People are so positively, purely motivated just to help,” Bickel said of working at the clinic. “People check their egos at the door. The spirit of cooperation — it’s a magical experience. I just kind of got sucked in.”
Until last July, the operating budget for the clinic was about $70,000, and the clinic was open six days per month. Within a year, it will be open almost every day, with a budget closer to $200,000. For several years, Bickel said, the clinic has served about 2,000 patients; this year, it could be double that. The goal is to be treating 5,000 patients per year, and to give them comprehensive care.
To help offset the costs, the clinic accepts donations (such as the $57,643 check in May from the Florida Hospital Flagler Foundation), and it also has plans for a resale shop that, according to Bickel’s research, could net the clinic upwards of $10,000 per month.
A NETWORK OF CARE
In the clinic, Bickel meets all walks of life, and, he said, “I try to treat every patient with respect.”
When he first met Raney in an exam room, he said, he was explaining the $100,000 price tag on his treatment. He told Raney apologetically, “I don’t want to make this too complicated.” Raney responded with a sense of humor. He said, “Don’t worry, I have a masters degree in economics.”
From that day until he received treatment, Raney spent the better part of a year playing phone tag and waiting, and then filling out paper work, and then waiting some more.
But Bickel sees Raney’s struggle to get treatment as being instructive and, unfortunately, not unique.
“We’re in the middle of creating this referral network to keep people from experiencing what Jonathan did,” Bickel said. “It’s one of our biggest challenges. A lot of times we’ll diagnose, but we can’t get them anywhere to get the care they need. … What we fully intend to achieve, and think we can, is a network that has virtually every specialist.”
To help raise money for the initiatives, Bickel is getting Raney’s help.
“He is just a super talented person, who’s had an extraordinary life, from great success to tragedy, who has learned a lot from all his experiences,” Bickel said. “He’s on an upswing now, and he wants to share his talents with the community. … He definitely knows who helped him when he needed it, and he wants to help others. He’s an interesting and warm human being.”
This summer, Raney will be speaking with community groups as part of the next phase of the growth at the Flagler County Free Clinic.
“It’s a great place,” Raney said. “I owe my life to it.”
THE NINE LIVES (SO FAR) OF JONATHAN RANEY
1. SOCCER STAR
Jonathan Raney was born in 1961 to a wealthy family in Ohio. He developed a talent for sports and graduated in 1978 from Cuyahoga Valley Christian Academy, being named all-state in both soccer and baseball. A tall young man with long hair, he continued his soccer career at Principia College, in Elsa, Illinois, a town with a population of 83 when school was not in session, he said. He was forced to give up baseball because he broke his shoulder in an accident while skateboarding, holding onto a car bumper at 30 mph.
2. PUNK ROCKER
In 1981, Raney was married and had a honeymoon baby in 1982. His son was severely handicapped and needed attention, but he decided this was his best chance to chase a second dream based on another of his talents: singing and playing guitar. Between 1982 and 1983, he embraced his Mohawk, 12 earrings and a nose ring, and he lived in New York City and played in a punk band, meeting many famous musicians, including Johnny Rotten, of the Sex Pistols.
3. BROKER EXTRAORDINAIRE
In 1984, Raney moved back to Ohio to get a “real job.” He dropped the punk look and wore a suit as a stockbroker. He was so hard working that he became one of the top performers nationwide in the company, a senior vice president, and earned lavish vacations around the world.
4. PRO RACER
At 5 years old, Raney rode his first motorcycle. And in the late-1980s and early 1990s, he renewed his love for racing and became a professional motocross racer, sponsored by Suzuki and others, making more than $30,000 per year on top of his big salaries as a stockbroker. He traveled three or four weekends a month to races around the country, fulfilling his adrenalin addiction.
5. COKE ADDICT
The attention given to racing led to Raney’s divorce in 1990. He got remarried, but his wealth from starting his own financial business only gave him the means to pursue his excesses. In the early- to mid-2000s, he became addicted to cocaine, doing drugs and drinking hard liquor every night after work, lying to cover it up and getting his tongue burned by angry drug dealers. It ultimately landed him in a hotel room with a gun in his hand, ready to commit suicide. The only thing that stopped him was the thought that he couldn’t let his sons live with the knowledge that their father had killed himself.
6. CARETAKER
He snapped out of it, and recovered in rehab, but he lost his second marriage in the process. Sober and ready for a new beginning, he sold his business and moved in with his dying father to take care of him. In 2009, his father died.
7. RUSSIAN MATCHMAKER
Online in 2009, Raney met a woman from Russia and fell in love. He left his home in the United States and moved to Russia to be with her and get married. After being victimized by corruption, bribery and muggings, Raney and his wife moved to Palm Coast, where they dealt in art and started a company to help other American men find successful marriages with Russian women.
8. PIZZA DELIVERYMAN
That company failed, and a custody battle led to the dissolution of Raney’s third marriage. It also drained his assets: He had, at one point, been worth almost $1 million, and now he was $120,000 in debt and lonely. Desperate for work, he got a job delivering pizza.
9. FREE CLINIC ADVOCATE
While on the pizza job in 2014, Raney slipped and fell, hurting his back, which had been injured a couple of decades earlier when he slammed into a concrete wall at 130 mph in a motorcycle race. The medical examinations ultimately turned up an even more serious problem, however: Cancer was discovered. Thanks to the Flagler County Free Clinic, he received the treatment he needed, but it took nine months. And that left him with a new goal: Help raise awareness of and funds for the Free Clinic, as well as a system that would help people get the help they needed more quickly than he did. He’ll deliver testimonials on a new campaign launching this summer.
