Mailbag: How Did DOTC’s Family Ride To Rescue?

OrangeTV: I’m curious to her more about your family’s rescue story 27 years ago by the English family. I’m part of that family too, and I was only 7 or 8 at the time, but I wonder if I remember anything about that — small world, as they say, eh?

DFO: I might get these relationships wrong. But around Halloween 27 years ago, my world was turned upside down upon learning that 3-month-old son, Seth, had contracted eye cancer and needed surgery ASAP to survive — in Seattle. We were living in Kalispell, Mont., at the time. Fortunately, a co-worker’s wife was good friends with either Dan’s sister or sister-in-law, who was living in Seattle. During the Halloween season of 1979, this Good Samaritan and her family interrupted their lives to pick us up at the airport, provide transportation and find housing for us near the hospital in the empty home of a UW professor. The ordeal was made much easier as a result of that enormous kindness. Seth, of course, survived sans right eye and ultimately underwent 20 treatments of chemotherapy under age 2. He’s now halfway through medical school at the University of Colorado. God is good. And so is Dan and his extended family.