WASHINGTON, October 9 (RIA Novosti) – A Russian astrophysicist diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma has turned online to raise $350,000 for potentially life-saving treatments in New York, after exhausting over $100,000 in donations he raised for the first stage of his treatment, the New York Daily News has reported.
Anton Buslov, 29, made the plea for new donors on the crowdsourcing site GiveForward.com after learning that the bone marrow transplant and aggressive chemotherapy he required could cost anywhere from $300,000 to $900,000, the paper reported.
Buslov initially received treatments in Russia, and when his doctor told him he had 18 months to live, he asked his girlfriend to marry him. “I asked her not to be my wife, but to be my widow,” he told the paper.
However, following the wedding ceremony, Buslov decided to fight the cancer. After researching treatments online, he discovered the Center for Lymphoid Malignancies in Columbia, New York.
A request for donations on his blog went viral and “…tens of thousands of ordinary people responded, and we managed to collected $150 thousand dollars (sic) in just one week, enough to begin treatment in New York,” Buslov wrote on his GoForward page.
With those funds depleted, he said he hopes the generosity of Good Samaritans will continue, writing: “I have hope and I have determination. Most of all I have tens of thousands of friends and a belief that there are even more good people who will befriend me in my time of need.”
By Wednesday morning, Buslov’s appeal had raised $22,601 of a $350,000 goal, with 17 days remaining before the fundraising period ends.
