An Alberta family preparing to stay in Toronto while their three triplets receive cancer treatments say they have been overwhelmed by the outpouring of support from Toronto residents offering their homes.
Just over 36 hours after posting a plea for temporary Toronto housing on their blog, Richard and Leslie Low say they received more than 80,000 visits to their website and over 500 emails from Toronto residents offering accommodation to the family.
After looking for something semi-permanent in Toronto, the Low family decided to turn to the Internet and reached out to local residents for help.
The response, they say, was unexpected.
“We were thinking maybe a couple emails saying, ‘Hey, check out this place,’ or helping us out, but we definitely weren’t expecting offers for people to move to their basement or move out so that we can move in or anything like that,” Richard Low told CTV Toronto via a Skype interview on Saturday.
“It’s definitely amazing, the response people have shown,” he added.
The Alberta family has identical triplets, Thomas, Mason and Luke. All three boys were diagnosed with retinoblastoma, a rare type of eye cancer, when they were only three months old.
The Low family says the odds of having triplets all diagnosed with the same cancer are extremely rare. Both Thomas and Mason have each had one eye removed as a result of the rare cancer that occurs in about one in every 20,000 births.
The family has made several trips to Toronto since the triplet’s diagnosis, seeking critical treatment for the infants from experts at Toronto’s SickKids Hospital.
While Alberta Health has paid for the family’s flights to Toronto, finding adequate housing accommodations has been left up to the Low family – adding a massive expense to an already stressful situation.
"It is extremely difficult to find short term accommodations that can fit triplets and 4 adults," they wrote on their blog on Thursday. "If we didn't have to worry about housing, I think these trips would be more manageable and a lot less stressful."
Their humble request quickly went viral, and the family was inundated with hundreds of offers from residents across the province.
By Saturday afternoon, the family said they were close to reaching a housing agreement.
The family has also thanked the many people who have offered to donate money. But they asked that supporters contribute to the family’s already existing fundraising campaign, rather than begin new fundraisers.
"Last month, we had scammers open up a fundraising using the boys [sic] pictures and our identical story,” the post said. “Due to this, we would appreciate if nobody else starts a fundraising campaign for us.”
The Low family recently discovered that Mason’s cancer has spread and while both Thomas and Luke are on six-week treatment plans, Mason is receiving chemotherapy and needs to be seen by a doctor every three weeks.
Despite the challenges, the family remains optimistic that everything will work out.
“This cancer is very aggressive and it’s really hard as parents to go through all this, but then we have so many people reach out to us and support us and it really helps us feel like we can make it through this and we can conquer it,” Leslie Low told CTV Toronto.
According to the Canadian Retinoblastoma Society, the retinoblastoma survival rate is over 96 per cent in Canada.
The family says that while prognosis for the three boys is good, they have years of hospital visits ahead of them. They say their goal is to save as much of the triplet’s vision as possible and stop the cancerous tumours from getting too big and spreading.
The family is asking parents to visit their blog for more information on how to check kids for retinoblastoma.
With a report from CTV Toronto’s Colin D’Mello
