Waterloo residents are rallying around a local family battling two rare medical conditions.
Natalie Zettler has terminal endocrine cancer, and one of her three sons, 12-year-old Noah, has an illness that continues to elude diagnosis.
Despite all this, the family says they’re staying strong with the help of the community.
“I may have cancer, but cancer does not have me,” says Natalie, who was diagnosed in 2011. “And that's how I am going to live, until I can’t possibly live like that anymore. I’ve got three little boys and they need me, and they need their friends, their hockey, their school.”
Last November Natalie’s middle son Noah fell ill. He has been in and out of the hospital, but doctors have so far not been able to pin down what’s making him sick.
“He was always a really energetic guy and then he was just gone for five months straight from school,” says Ben Haller, Noah’s classmate. “And we didn`t learn until about a month after he was gone about how serious it was.”
If all that wasn’t enough, doctors recently told Natalie Health Canada was pulling the funding for her specialized cancer treatment.
She continues to commute to-and-from hospitals in London and Hamilton, as bills pile up.
Some weeks, they spend more than $300 just to make it to their scheduled appointments.
That’s why Rob Maxwell, owner of the Laurelwood Dairy Queen in Waterloo, held a fundraiser on Saturday.
He donated all of the money from the day’s purchases to the Zettlers.
“Small donations at the end of the day, they add up to something very large,” he says.
