Cancer, no kidney, surgery pending, KC area woman seeks help with snow to reach hospital
Editor’s note: Follow live Kansas City blizzard coverage here.
As a child in snowy Nashua, New Hampshire, Ginger Cone — “C.o.n.e, like in ice cream cone,” she said — remembers the days when she’d tough it out, and trudge to school through thigh-high drifts.
But now age 59, having battled back cancer three times, one kidney gone, and a pre-surgical appointment scheduled for Wednesday, Cone knew that the blizzard that blanketed the Kansas City area Sunday with up to a foot of snow wasn’t one she could handle alone.
For many, the deluge of snow, wrapped in sub-freezing temperatures promising to sink toward zero, raised the specter of power outages and busted pipes. But for Cone, having someone dig out her car and driveway in Gladstone bordered on existential.
“I usually try to do as much as I can with the help of my daughter,” Cone said. Except her adult daughter, too, has had difficulties, living and working at home after being diagnosed three years back with an inoperable brain tumor that thankfully is benign, but still has its own effects
“I have a small electric snowblower,” Cone said. “But we haven’t gotten this much snow since the blizzard in ‘21. No way I could do it. My physical health is not that good anymore.”
Neighbors, she said, seemed busy and as packed in as her. So on Monday, Cone sent out an appeal on the app Nextdoor.
“This is an emergency,” she wrote, saying she was more than willing to pay for the help. “I am disabled and am having surgery on Wednesday, need to possibly be in tomorrow. . . .(P)lease if someone could contact me, let me know if they are in the area and can do a small job worth more than you know.”
Later, she said, “I mean, I would pay anything. I have to go to the hospital Wednesday.”
Robert Young and his younger brother, Blake Thompson, answered the plea. Young, 35, is a handyman, with his own business, Good Vibes Handyman Services. The cold of winter is usually cold for business. This is the first time he’s begun doing snow removal.
No plow on front of this Ford F-350 diesel, he and his brother on Monday were working with shovels, heaving snow by hand at $75 an hour. If a job took 30 minutes, it would be half that, plus an added fee to spread salt.
“This time of the year is slow for me,” Young said. “I’m just trying to help people out. I’m just trying to make it through.”
Young said he had 10 jobs lined up Monday. They began at 8:30 a.m and he suspected the two of them would be working until the sun dropped.
Most of the job are similar to Cone’s.
“People with emergencies,” Young said. “They just need somebody to do it right now.”
By 1 p..m, the brothers pulled up in their truck with Blake’s Labrador retriever, GG, in the backseat, to greet a grateful Cone.
“Just me and my brother,” Young said, “and our shovels.”
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