Town Rallies to Help 'Gentle Giant' Firefighter Diagnosed with Cancer: 'Always Room for a Miracle'
Go Fund Me Volunteer Winfield, Mo., firefighter Roy Lewis
As a volunteer firefighter, Roy Lewis is among the first to jump in when others are in need.
"He loves giving his all to help other people," Matt Armstrong, a fellow volunteer firefighter and pastor of Calvary Assembly of God church in Winfield, Mo., tells PEOPLE. "Whatever the job calls for, he steps up to the plate, and he's ready to go do it."
At the same time, Lewis, 49, is not the kind to seek help for himself. Instead, as a former Marine, "they want to, you know, just be on their own and help themselves," says Armstrong, who is also president of the Winfield Foley Firefighters Association.
But sometimes, that's not enough.
When Lewis recently needed help moving his belongings out of his home, he quietly shared with a few people that he was selling the house and moving into a rental. He told them he needed to raise money for expenses following a brain cancer diagnosis.
"We're a smaller farm-town community, a pretty rural area," says Arron Lee, chief of the Winfield Foley Fire Protection District, which covers 95 square miles of eastern Lincoln County, about 45 miles northwest of St. Louis.
"Everybody went to high school with one another. Just very close-knit. So when something like this happens, especially one of our first responders or one of our hometown heroes, it seems like people really want to be involved."
Barbecues raised money. A local business frequented by firefighters closed early and then sold food, with the proceeds benefiting Lewis' needs. Friends, including Lee's wife, Audrey, created a GoFundMe donation page slowly building toward its $12,500 goal.
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"Our goal is to help support chemo treatment costs and some monthly bills while Roy is undergoing chemo treatments," she wrote, describing Lewis as "one of the most selfless firefighters on our local volunteer fire department."
When not assisting the department that responds to about a thousand calls a year, says Chief Lee, Lewis works for a company that employs him as an HVAC technician and mechanical equipment repairman.
But Lewis has put work on hold during his treatment, and insurance doesn't cover all of his costs.
In addition, he lost both his mother and his brother to brain cancer — his father has also passed away — and Lewis has no family in the area for support. Moving to a rental with a no-pets policy also required Lewis to give up his dog, a husky he named Mando.
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The cancer has already reached stage three, "but we are trying to be positive," says Lee, who adds, "there's always room for a miracle."
"He's a gentle giant," he says of Lewis. "He's just got a big heart and really just anything he can do to help somebody in need or in the community, whether it's responding to fire calls, working PR events, training new recruits coming on, teaching young kids at school fire safety tactics, just any way he can give back."
Adds Armstrong: "He's just an amazing man in general, amazing firefighter. He's just hard-working at anything and everything he does, whether it be within the department or outside, just in the community. He's one of the first ones to step up to, you know, maybe lead an initiative to take a collection up for somebody or, you know, 'hey, what are we doing? I want to give towards it.'"
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"He is been kind of tight-knit with, you know, telling what's going on, but as time has gone on, he's slowly opened up to some of us," he says. "And, you know, it's been hard for him to accept help."
But that hasn't discouraged Lewis. "He's fighting," Armstrong says. "He's planning on coming back."
"He fights fires for his community," his friends wrote on the GoFundMe page, "let's help him fight this battle with cancer."
