This has all the makings of a sad story, but the characters involved have decided to write their own happy ending.
Jacqueline Ezeard-Petroff, 61, recently discovered she has cancer, and the prognosis isn’t good.
Two months ago, the normally healthy Ezeard-Petroff developed severe headaches, so the doctor sent her for a scan. Over a few weeks of what she and her grandson Dustin Petroff, 24, describe as shock and awe, she was told she has cancer in her brain, lungs and bones. Doctors have given her three to six months to live.
After the initial shock started to wear off, Petroff, who was raised by his grandmother and grandfather after his father died when he was a child, decided he wanted to do something amazing for his grandma.
“I have lived with them since I was really little and they have been my parental figures,” he said, adding that his grandma volunteered in his classes in elementary school. “Papa always took me to all my sporting activities… and Grandma was always there too.”
Petroff knew his grandparents had never been able to travel much, so he turned to a crowdfunding site with the idea of raising a few thousand dollars to send the couple on “one last trip.”
He wrote up a campaign profile page on GoFundMe and waited to see what would happen. The campaign took off and developed a life of its own.
He said, “$2,400 was my goal and that was just enough to send the two of them and we reached that goal within 15 hours and I couldn’t believe it. It is absolutely unbelievable.”
At press time the campaign had raised well over $6,000 and was still growing.
Some of the donors got to know Ezeard-Petroff over the past eight years she worked as a special needs assistant for the Sea to Sky school district.
“If I can fight this, I will go back,” she said of her work.
When The Squamish Chief spoke to Ezeard-Petroff at her Squamish General Hospital bedside last week, she had just gotten the news of the campaign and trip an hour before, so the surprise was a bit overwhelming, she said.
“I still can’t believe it,” she said. “I haven’t even had time to think about it.”
And it turns out she isn’t much into international travel, so she has decided she would instead like to have a big family reunion in Toronto, with all her loved ones.
“I mean back east isn’t a great place to go to, but I haven’t seen my family in five years,” she said. The money raised so far with the campaign will be enough to send the whole family back east, she said.
But first she has some cancer treatments to undergo, something for which she is bracing.
“I don’t look sick. I am going to call the doctor on it. I am going to fight it,” she said. “I am going to fight with all I can and I am not going to give up.”
As soon as she is well enough, the trip will be booked, she said.
To check out the campaign go to, www.gofundme.com/regk2s.
