Thursday was your last chance to help out STARS and get in on all of their prizes for this year's lottery.

Fifty per cent of the air ambulance's operating cost is fueled by donations and proceeds from their annual STARS Lottery.

They help save lives of people like Suzette Rodgers, who came home from surgery one day.

“And within a few hours, I was having difficulty swallowing, and it became apparent fairly quickly that something wasn’t right,” she said. “So I went to the Wigmore Hospital here in Moose Jaw and saw somebody in emergency and it became known really quickly that I had a blood clot in my neck.”

She needed to get to emergency surgery in Regina as quickly as possible, and STARS picked her up and brought her to Regina.

“I was told it took 16 minutes to get from Moose Jaw to Regina into the O.R.,” Rodgers said. “Time is always of the essence in an emergency situation. So STARS came for me, and I’m sure I’m here because of STARS.”

Rodgers now volunteers for STARS because of her close call.

“It’s just such an important service that they provide to our community,” she said. “A lot of people think of STARS landing in a farmers field because of an accident, or on the middle of a highway in a catastrophic event. But a lot of their trips are transfers between hospitals for critically ill patients as well. So sometimes people don’t realize the scope of what they do and how important that is.”

The early bird ticket deadline was Thursday and the official deadline is July 18th.