Wednesday, October 29, 2014
YOUNGSTOWN
Thanks to an anonymous $60,000 donation, a Youngstown woman says she will be reunited today with her brother who has been in a hospital in China for the past eight months.
Dawn Borosko, 41, has been trying to raise the nearly $100,000 needed to pay John Berisford’s hospital bills and for an air ambulance to bring him back to the United States since an accident befell him in March while he was in China.
Today, that goal has become reality, as Berisford, 36, of West Virginia, was expected to arrive in Cleveland early today.
“I cried,” she said of learning about the donation. “It’s a huge relief. A huge weight was lifted off my shoulders.”
She said the money was deposited into an account she had set up for donations.
Berisford moved to China in December 2013 to work as an English-language teacher at the Web International English Training Center in Yangzhou.
He was set to leave China in March, but some type of accident that left him in a coma befell him the day he was supposed to leave, Borosko told The Vindicator in August.
Asked in August to confirm aspects of Berisford’s circumstances in China, a State Department official declined to comment, citing privacy considerations.
Borosko had fundraisers and asked for donations to cover the $60,000-plus cost of an air ambulance and the more than $35,000 in hospital bills that had accumulated. As of early August, she had raised a little more than $26,000.
Berisford was set to arrive in Cleveland about 1 a.m. today, at which point he was to be taken to the Cleveland Clinic, Borosko said. She said she plans to move him sometime soon to a rehabilitation center closer to Youngstown.
As for his condition, Borosko said his eyes are open and that he is in stable condition, is breathing on his own and is responding to light, touch and sound.
“I’m always going to be optimistic. Anything’s possible,” she said. “Once he gets here, it’s going to be one day at a time.”