Donna Toll is home.
The Sault native, who is a terminally ill cancer patient, has had her dying wish fulfilled by being flown back to her hometown to spend her last days surrounded by her four daughters, grandchildren, great-grandchildren and Jake, her beloved 14-year-old African grey parrot.
As reported earlier by SooToday, Donna was too ill to be flown home from Edmonton, where she spent many years of her life, by a regular commercial flight.
Instead, she needed to be flown home by air ambulance.
Her four daughters (Cheryl Sidor, Cindy Naderer, Tricia Turcotte and Jodi-Lynne Gibb) appealed to the public to help with the $33,850 cost of flying Donna home by air ambulance through a GoFundMe site and a Global Angel site.
“We contacted many people for help,” Cindy told SooToday Wednesday.
Finally, the family scraped up the money themselves to pay for the air ambulance flight, which ended up costing approximately $28,000.
The two fundraising sites are still up, as Donna’s daughters wish to raise funds for Angels of Flight (who flew Donna home).
“There was a total change from watching the clock and thinking ‘that flight’s not coming and nobody cares’ to the fact where we were able to walk into her room and say ‘Mom, you are going on a plane home today.’”
Donna boarded the air ambulance in Edmonton (where she was hospitalized at Grey Nuns Community Hospital) at 2:55 a.m. Sunday, Oct. 15 (Mountain Daylight Time) and now has a room at Sault Area Hospital, surrounded by loved ones.
“We had her outside for the first time in a wheelchair today,” Cindy said, adding Donna was overjoyed to be with her parrot Jake.
Daughter Jodi-Lynne Gibb, who is a nurse at Sault Area Hospital, said “she’s doing well. I’ve been a nurse for six years and I’ve never seen anybody with the willpower that she has.”
“We didn’t know if she would survive the flight but we said ‘we have to do this’…when she landed in the Sault she said ‘I told you I would make it home.’”
The plane landed in heavy winds in the Sault on Sunday.
“She knows she has cancer but she’s astounding everybody right now. She has us all flabbergasted. This lady’s determined she’s not going anywhere,” she chuckled through the tears.
“She had the chance to meet her youngest great-granddaughter for the first time, six hours after landing. That lit up her face. We got a few of the grandkids in before they had to go away to work out of town.”
“Her positive attitude and having her family around in her hometown has changed everything. She has us astounded. The cancer is terminal, its aggressive, but she’s not the person who left Edmonton. She has hope.”
“We’re here for her and we care, she isn’t alone.”
“Those Angels of Flight people truly were angels,” said Jodi-Lynne, who accompanied Donna on the flight while her three sisters (and parrot Jake) drove to the Sault from Alberta, adding the doctors and nurses at Sault Area Hospital “have been awesome.”
