Help the Goddess Manage Terminal Cancer Pain

Hi, I'm Erin and I'm fundraising for my dear friend Lee-Anne Doré, known to many of her friends as the Goddess. Lee-Anne is living with terminal cancer, and her disability pension does not cover all of the medicine that she needs to manage her pain.

I have known Lee-Anne since we attended horticultural school together at what was then Malaspina College, way back in 1994. I was 19 then and she was 33. We became fast friends. I was so in awe of Lee-Anne's big, free spirit and fearless attitude (of course I soon learned that she is indeed the softest of teddy bears). At the time Lee-Anne lived with the love of her life, Darrell, in a little old apartment in downtown Nanaimo. In anyone else's hands, the apartment wouldn't have been much, but like all of Lee-Anne's homes, this one was filled with plants, art of all stripes, coloured glass bottles, books, and beautiful antique furniture brought back from some place where it had been neglected or forgotten, all gorgeously curated. The Goddess was shabby chic way before shabby chic was a thing.

She and Darrell used to go up the logging roads into the bush and there they would find all kinds of flotsam and jetsam, old bottles and tins, mostly, but once they found the treasure of all treasures: the rusted cab of a Model-T Ford. Amazing! Somehow they got this thing onto the bed of Darrell's truck and hauled it back to the home they were living in, now a lovely split level that backed onto a creek in a new suburb just outside of town. Once there, they set it up beautifully, got cushions for the old seat, and the model -T began its new life as a covered bench with a view over the garden. And of course, this being the Goddess, the garden was absolutely incredible.

Since she finished her horticultural certificate, Lee-Anne went on to earn her BA and two Masters certificates. In addition to her studies, the Goddess has volunteered in the community consistently, run her own garden design business, and started a non-profit organization, McSeeds, which aimed to house mentally ill folks and set them up to learn to farm.

Lee-Anne is such a generous person that it's almost embarrassing. Whenever we go to visit her, like when anyone goes to visit her, we somehow come away with a basket of gifts: jars full of the harvest she has put away that year, or that day, toys for the kids, maybe a wool sweater, a scarf, whatever she has that she thinks we might like. She is such a giving and warm person that for years my kids thought that her name was "Friendly Anne," which of course was a mis-hearing of "my friend Lee-Anne," but the name fits.

One of the most amazing things about the Goddess is that she is somehow this extremely generous person even though she has struggled with PTSD from what was sometimes a harrowing childhood, and from witnessing the tragic death of her beloved, Darrell. She has also lived many years at or around the poverty level as a single person on a disability pension.

In 2012, Lee-Anne was diganosed with Ovarian cancer. She was by then living in the little cottage she lives in now in Nanaimo. She traveled back and forth to Victoria for 13 sessions of chemotherapy. Every time we visited during this period, she was still so openhearted, and still remained so positive about where she was with her illness. The Goddess did overcome this bout of cancer, and lived for a while without its burden. Then, in 2018, she began to suffer from severe abdominal pain, which was eventually diagnosed as terminal ovarian cancer. The doctors told her that she could treat the illness with chemo and radiation, but that it would only extend her life for about six months. The Goddess decided not to put herself through the trauma of chemo once again, and has been living with her diagnosis ever since.

Some of the medicine she takes is covered by medical, but she has an additional $800 per month that she cannot cover with her small disability income. My great hope with this GofundMe is that people can find it in their hearts to pay it forward to this most beautiful, kind, and loving human, the Goddess, our Goddess, Lee-Anne Doré. Being able to afford all of her medicine each month will help to ease some of the stress she feels in this last little bit of time she has left.

Thank you so much for taking the time to read this page.

Best,

Erin