Walter Quintana, right, thanks Delano Price for his donation for Quintana's 10-year-old grandson, Jacob, who has an inoperable brain tumor. Quintana was passing out fliers near North Silverbell and West Grant roads advertising a fundraiser for Jacob, which will be held Saturday.

Benjie Sanders / Arizona Daily Star

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Fundraiser for cancer patient

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A West Side man's love for his cancer-stricken grandson has inspired him to spend months organizing a fundraiser, single-handedly passing out hundreds of fliers on foot.

Walter Quintana, 53, learned in January that his 10-year-old grandson, Jacob, has an inoperable brain tumor.

"It was just devastating," he remembers. "As you can see from the pictures, he and I are real close," he said, showing photos of himself and Jacob smiling brightly.

Before the diagnosis, Jacob had had bouts of vomiting for three months, but doctors said it was the stomach flu, said Quintana's daughter Monique, who is raising Jacob and his brother Noah, age 22 months, in Cave Creek.

Since then, Quintana has painfully watched his grandson undergo many changes. He recalls when he first saw Jacob after he lost his hair to chemo.

"It was so hard, when I'd first seen him. He was bald. He had no eyebrows," said Quintana, who works as a clerk at Safeway Food and Drug, 2140 W. Grant Road.

Coping with losing his hair was difficult for Jacob, and the chemotherapy made him sick, said Monique, 30, a banker at a Chase bank branch in Phoenix. "He just wanted to sleep through the whole thing."

The chemotherapy shrank Jacob's tumor from the size of a golf ball to the size of a pinkie nail, she said. His hair is growing back, and he's now undergoing radiation to get rid of the rest of the cancer.

Since May, Quintana has been organizing a fundraiser to help pay the family's medical bills, which total about $3,000 because their insurance covers 90 percent of their costs, Monique said.

She said she was at first a little apprehensive when her father told her of his fundraising idea, because neither of them had ever done anything like it before.

Both she and Walter said the planning process hasn't always been easy.

Yet they kept up the hard work, and Quintana's idea is now a reality. The fundraiser will be from 2 to 8 p.m. Saturday at the Cocio-Estrada American Legion Post No. 59, 750 N. Grande Ave.

It will feature fun stuff for kids and adults including a jumping castle, car show, live music, disc jockey, face-painting, food and treats such as snow cones, and raffle prizes. Both Monique and Jacob will be there.

"Mainly, it's just going to be a big, giant picnic, but you have to pay for your food," Quintana said. Admission will be free, so the event will raise money through food sales and donations. He and Monique haven't set a fundraising goal.

Quintana's friends and his co-workers at Safeway are helping him put on the event.

Co-worker Ray Blanco, who also lives on the West Side, organized the fundraiser's car show with help from his friends.

"It's just friends helping friends out. We've been co-workers for a long time, and I've seen all the effort he's put into his grandson — quite a bit," Blanco said.

Quintana doesn't have a car, so he tries to take the shuttle up to the Phoenix area once a month to spend time with Jacob, Monique and Noah.

Jacob is too weak now to play the sports that he loves — basketball, football and swimming — and he's also too weak to wrestle much and roughhouse with his grandpa like they used to, Quintana said.

"He can't do a lot. He gets tired real quick," he said.

But they still have fun.

"He and I will just kick back. We'll bring the mattress down from upstairs, and we'll sit there playing video games. I'll just sit there for hours watching him play," Quintana said. "Then we'll just fall asleep, and we always hold hands."