Michael “Shroud” Grzesiek is known to use his platform for more than just showing off his skill in first-person shooters. In one of his most recent streams, he learned an old friend was diagnosed with cancer and he immediately jumped in her livestream while he was still playing Apex Legends.
Jennifer “jenniez_tv” Shih, who is a labor and delivery nurse, was recently diagnosed with stage four colon cancer. According to a tweet from jenniez_tv, her chemotherapy will begin tomorrow. With the diagnosis, she turned to her Twitch channel to help raise money for her cancer treatment. While she streamed, someone told Shroud about the situation and he recognized her after meeting her six years ago at ESEA LAN. He immediately directed his chat to go to her channel to show support.
Despite being one squad elimination away from winning a match on Apex, Shroud made sure his channel knew how to find jenniez_tv on Twitch. In addition to directing his own stream to jenniez_tv, Shroud also donated $2,500 toward jenniez_tv’s goal of raising $5,000 on her livestream for her cancer treatments.
Related: Shroud surpassess 100,000 Twitch subscribers
After Shroud sent his channel over to support jenniez_tv and donated, jenniez_tv reached her $5,000 goal within a short period of time. While Twitch is sometimes known for toxic communities and problems enforcing its own terms of service, Shroud has proved, yet again, that the platform can make a positive difference.
