AUBURN – Darcy Bosse couldn’t believe it when one of her neighbors showed up at her house on Christmas Eve, dressed as Santa and carrying presents for her kids.
She is shocked every time she wakes up or arrives home to find her driveway plowed and her walkway shoveled.
Now, the fact that others have organized a benefit concert for her and complete strangers have volunteered to help is beyond anything the 33-year-old Auburn woman ever imagined.
“I don’t know how to make sense of it all,” she said.
A mother of three, Bosse was diagnosed with myeloid leukemia last November.
She went to see a doctor after weeks of feeling exhausted and rundown.
She also noticed that she had been bruising easily.
The doctor told her that she got there just in time. She needed a blood transfusion immediately.
Within days, she was getting her first chemotherapy treatments and making trips to Boston to see a specialist.
She had to quit her job as the office manager and bartender at Rack M Up in Auburn because her doctor ordered her to minimize her exposure to other people and germs.
Although she and her husband, Dan, have health insurance, the expenses of traveling back and forth to Boston while relying on one income have added up quickly.
That is when her friend, Carrie McFerren, came up with the idea of a benefit concert. A manager and bartender at Legends bar in Lewiston, McFerren asked local musicians if they would be willing to perform.
Everyone she asked said yes. The bands performing at Saturday’s concert include Kaining Amy, Cambiata, Stars Look Down and Charyou Tree.
People will be charged $5 at the door, and all of the proceeds will go to Bosse and her family to help them in the weeks to come.
The money will come at the perfect time.
Bosse recently learned that she will undergo a bone marrow transplant in late February or March. The surgery will be done at Brigham Women’s Hospital in Boston.
She will be in the hospital for four to eight weeks, and the doctors have told her it could be a year before she is well enough to work again.
“It’s all still kind of sinking in,” Bosse said. “But I just feel so grateful. People are so nice.”
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