A fundraising effort to help a New Brunswick man dealing with a difficult diagnosis has received a major financial shot in the arm from a donor who's choosing to remain anonymous.
As a stay-at-home dad of two young daughters, Dave Love leads a busy life, but since his diagnosis five years ago, the day-to-day tasks have become more difficult.
“I do less than I used to,” said Love. “For example, I used to clean the house, do the laundry, do all that stuff, and that stuff is hard to do now and it may get harder down the road.”
In 2014 he was diagnosed with progressive multiple sclerosis, a neurodegenerative disease that also affected his grandfather.
“I grew up with a dad who had MS, so now my son has it too,” says Darlene Love, Dave’s mother. “So for me, it's like a double whammy, but our little family, we step up to the plate and we stick together.”
With that in mind, Darlene Love started up a GoFundMe page for her son, to help him buy a converted van at a total cost of around $85,000.
That’s something he says would give him back a sense of independence.
“The vehicle is going to come equipped with hand controls so I'll be able to drive, which is huge,” Dave Love says. “But in the short term, I'm going to take lessons to learn how to use the hand controls safely.”
Right around the time they thought the campaign had run its course they got word of an anonymous donation.
“They were willing to put up $10,000 and they were hoping it was going to be a matching donation for like a three-week period until May 30,” said Dave Love.“It gives you the idea that what you are doing is worthy enough for those people to do that, but still it's incredible, it's something you find hard to believe.”
The campaign has now raised over $26,000 and that doesn't include the anonymous donation.
“To get at this level, we were just blown away,” said Dave Love. “It's been people we knew, coworkers, friends, family but also people we did not know at all, so it's been amazing.”
With files from CTV Atlantic’s Laura Lyall.
