35-Year-Old Zach Bolster was making a substantial income as the vice president of a successful hedge fund on Wall Street (one of the highest paying jobs in America) when tragedy struck.
His mother was suddenly diagnosed with stage 4 pancreatic cancer.
“She was the glue that held our family together. We dropped everything and moved to Charlotte to help my father and sister care for her,” Bolster said. His fiancé Patricia Wu, a successful NYC real estate broker, also quit her job and moved down to Charlotte.
The family took turns driving their mother to and from hospital visits and sitting with her at home. While caring for her, Bolster noticed how many other cancer patients didn’t have support systems and either had to drive themselves to treatment, or didn’t at all.
“It deeply saddened us to think about a cancer patient missing their treatment because of transportation issues, especially when it seemed like such an easy problem to solve. My family and I became obsessed with solving it,” Bolster said.
Gloria Bolster passed away in December of 2016, just 5 weeks after her initial diagnosis.
3 mother later, Zach and Patricia launched ChemoCars in her memory.
“We now wake up every morning and go to bed every night thinking about how we can send every cancer patient to treatment. We’ve had amazing success to date, but we still have so many patients to help,” Bolster said.
ChemoCars works with Uber and Lyft, to provide free, round-trip transportation to chemotherapy, radiation, and non-surgical cancer treatments.
Since they started, they’ve already given out over 2,000 free rides.
Find out more, donate, or get involved at ChemoCars.org