Dad seeks a leg for his daughter
The best birthday gift Paul LeFever would want to give his 10-year-old daughter is a prosthetic leg.
But, that wish may not be fulfilled for April 6, 2021, as he is having a hard time sourcing $700,000 to get her the leg.
He has secured the services of the Sir John Golding Rehabilitation Centre to provide the prosthetic.
“To be honest with you, I have been crying since the day I heard my daughter had cancer until the day they took the leg. It’s like I don’t even know myself, knowing that my first daughter is only going to have one leg. Even now, sometimes if I sit by myself, I keep thinking about it. When I look at her with one leg, it hurts me a lot. It’s never a good feeling,” he said.
DIAGNOSIS
LeFever says he went to work overseas in February when he found out that his first child, Bobby-Gale, had bone cancer. “My lady tell me she (Bobby-Gale) start feeling pain in her knee each time she give her a shower and she touch her knee. So I tell her to take her to the doctor. By taking her to the different doctors, we start getting different results. We take her to bone specialist at the Royale Medical Centre and the bone specialist tell us is cancer and we need to do a lot more tests. We take her to Bustamante Hospital and they did biopsy, all the other cancer tests and they say is cancer,” the Westmoreland native said.
LeFever says since receiving his daughter’s diagnosis, he has tried finding other treatment but the only option was to amputate her leg.
The procedure was done in May at the Savanna-la-Mar Hospital. He said the decision was very hard to make but he is still thankful that she has life.
“There’s always a lot of people come to visit me and I have friends that I can talk and laugh with so I don’t really put it (the amputation) on the top of my head. That’s what keeps me going, and then again God is always good,” LeFever said. He tries to support his daughter by showing her inspirational videos of persons who lost their legs. He also helps her move around. “Sometimes I have to lift her up because she is a bit scared with the crutches,” he said.
Bobby-Gale is currently undergoing chemotherapy at the Cornwall Regional Hospital every three weeks. LeFever also said that she has to get an injection seven days after doing chemotherapy, which helps build her white blood cell count. But if it is not available in any public hospital, it could cost him $100,000.
However, his main focus is getting his daughter to complete chemotherapy and to be cancer free.