Stephanie Headley, 48, has been struggling with systemic scleroderma for more than a decade. It is an autoimmune disease that causes the body to produce too much collagen, which then hardens the skin, blood vessels and vital organs, eventually leading to the heart to fail.
Stephanie, a single mother of four, felt that her time was running out, tweeting on social media site Twitter that she just hoped to live long enough to see her youngest children graduate.
She then found hope in stem cell treatments when researching online, and even tracked down a hospital that could perform treatment on her with an 80% chance of success!
But there was a catch, as there often is. She would have to get to Chicago, and the treatment comes at a hefty monetary price of USD$116,000 (£68,000), which translate into CAD$125,000 for Stephanie - money that just wasn’t within her reach.
Stephanie’s children - aged 15, 18, 23, and 30 - did what many have done in recent technological times, and started a fundraising page online , hoping to raise enough money to send their mum to Chicago and save her life. Money started to come in, but it just wasn’t enough.
Then on July 3 came possibly the most peculiar and yet wonderful evening for the Headleys.
Someone phoned the family home, originally asking to speak to Skylar, Stephanie's daughter, but then telling Stephanie that he would like to donate to her cause. Stephanie said the man’s voice was strange, like one of those that has been deliberately altered, made monotonous, as if he didn’t want to be recognised.
Stephanie didn’t dwell too much on it and was just grateful that he wanted to help, writing him out a thank you card and awaiting his arrival.
Just ten minutes later there was a knock on the door, which upon opening revealed a tall, slender man. His coat was buttoned up as far as it would go, and he wore a hat and reflective sunglasses. He handed Stephanie an envelope without the hint of a word or a smile, “completely stone-faced”, much as you would imagine a secret agent to behave on a top-secret mission.
As she handed the strange man the thank you card and said, “God bless you,” he finally smiled before turning away and walking off, with no indication as to who he was or what the envelope held inside.
“I opened [the envelope] and literally fell on the floor, collapsed, crying and screaming,” Stephanie recalled. “I thought I was seeing the numbers wrong, the decimals wrong, the zeroes wrong.”
Inside the envelope had been a cheque for CAD$128,000 (£70,000), enough to cover Stephanie's life-saving treatment.
The family still have no idea who the man was, but thanks to his generosity, Stephanie is now scheduled to begin three months worth of treatment in Chicago from September 22.
Stephanie is still hoping for donations to fund her trip and accommodation in Chicago (you can donate here ), and assuming that all goes well, she should be out and about again after a year or so, and she will be planning to campaign for the treatment to be brought to Canada.
But right now, she is just happy that she has a chance to spend more time with her children, all down to a mysterious man who knocked on her door.
“He gave me my life back and saved my children from a horrible loss and pain that would have changed their lives immeasurably,” she said. “They are going to have their mother back; we are going to have our lives back and live like normal people for the first time in 13 years.”
No comments:
Post a Comment