When Annie Gross was diagnosed with lung cancer, she was stunned. The 65-year-old Salt Spring Island woman had never smoked a day in her life.
But she didn’t know that an online community, some of them complete strangers, would give her a chance at recovery.
Gross was first diagnosed in Jan. 2014 after she noticed she’d been struggling to catch her breath on her daily walks. Her husband urged her to go to a doctor – who found a massive tumour in her right lung.
“I was completely shocked,” she says. “But it didn’t take me long to think, ‘Okay, this is what I’m dealing with and we need to do something about it.’ I’m not a wallower.”
Her right lung was removed and she prepared for a long, hard battle – and many crippling chemotherapy treatments to prevent the cancer from returning.
“It was very, very harsh,” Gross recalls. “My immune system was knocked sideways…I could barely get up off the couch. After four of the twelve treatments they recommended I stop.”
After ceasing chemotherapy treatments, Gross says she regained her health and strength – at a cost.
A follow-up with her doctor found the cancer had metastasized to her remaining lung.
Gross was told she’d have up to 18 months to live and that additional chemotherapy would only improve her chance of survival by seven per cent.
“I knew that I wanted to do whatever I could to live a long and healthy life,” she says. “But I want to have a good quality of life. It was very, very hard on me and my family when I was so ill with the chemotherapy, and I just couldn’t subject them or myself to that again.”
She started researching holistic treatments, and with advice from a naturopathic doctor, began receiving intravenous vitamin C and mistletoe extract injections. While there is limited evidence it can help the immune system fight cancer, mistletoe extract is a natural alternative that has been shown to kill cancer cells in a laboratory, according to the U.S. National Cancer Institute.
The treatments started in July and Gross said she feels “really healthy” since beginning them, though she won’t know for sure until another scan in January.
But the treatments are expensive at $2,000 a month, and not covered under insurance, so Gross and her family wouldn’t have been able to afford them forever.
That’s when her adult son and daughter launched a fundraising campaign on the popular crowdsourcing website GoFundMe with a goal of $25,000 to help their mother pay for the pricey treatments.
In under two months, the campaign shattered their goal – raising more than $30,000 thanks to friends, family and even complete strangers.
“That is the extraordinary thing. There are [donors] there who, nobody knows who they are,” she said. “It’s overwhelming. I’ve had to learn to receive. I was a better do-er for others than I was for myself.”
Gross said her battle has given her an opportunity to focus on herself in a way she hasn’t been able to before, and now she wants to inspire others to live as meaningful a life as possible.
“It doesn’t really matter what happens to you in life, the most important thing is how you deal with it,” she said. “Life happens, and it has a way of just carrying on.”
