One final trip to say goodbye to family in China — that was the goal for Lilia Avoutova and her husband.
The Burnaby couple made it to China, but the reunion never happened.
Avoutova suffered a major stroke shortly after arriving and has been in a medically induced coma ever since.
This has left her family at a loss on how to move forward.
“She has cerebral hemorrhage and cerebral artery blockage, and there may be some brain damage,” said Elena Lanteigne, Avoutova’s daughter.
“We don’t know.”
CityNews reached Lanteigne in her Kunming hotel room. She and her brother flew from Canada as soon as they got the news.
She says keeping her mom in the ICU costs $1,000 a day, and the language barrier makes communicating with hospital staff a serious challenge.
“A lot of our conversations happen over Google Translate, and it makes it that much more difficult to get an understanding of my mom’s condition and her prognosis and where things are going and what we’re doing.”
They would like to bring her back to Canada, but there is a major hurdle.
“The amount of money that we’ve been quoted to bring my mom home has been just astronomical,” Lanteigne said.
It’s about $400,000 Canadian for a chartered medivac and more than $100,000 for a medically-supported commercial flight that she’s not even in a stable enough condition to take.
Lanteigne says it’s a cautionary tale – her parents didn’t take out travel medical insurance before leaving. But that doesn’t change their current reality.
“They know what my opinion is, and they’ve made their own decision and their own choices and this is where we are,” she said.
“My goal right now is not to think back to what could have been and what we should have done. My goal right now is to figure out a way forward.”
Lanteigne says her mom, whose Ukrainian background earned her the title “Babushka,” has spent her life looking out for family, and now she wants to return the favour, no matter what.
“She is so kind, she does everything for others, she always puts her family first,” she said. “When she’s sick, it’s not a thing.”
“I want to be able to do this for her, because now is the time to take care of her.”
Friends have set up a fundraiser to help cover the costs of getting Avoutova back home, but hope remains for a family reunion – this one in Canada.
