What began as a cookie and hot chocolate sale at the end of Tristan Alvarez’s driveway ended in the Port Coquitlam 12-year-old foregoing trick-or-treat candy to help raise money for a five-year-old girl suffering from inoperable brain tumours.
“He calls her his ‘angel,’” Alvarez’s mother, Dayna Lonquist, told The Tri-City News.
Five-year-old Natalie MacDonald has neurofibramatosis type 1, or NF-1, the complex disorder that leads to tumour growth all over the body. Several tumours have grown in her brain, obstructing her hearing to the point where she has become partially deaf. The tumours have also affected her airway and, at night, Natalie needs a breathing machine to help her sleep.
All that means that the Coquitlam kindergarten student visits BC Children’s Hospital every week to see an oncologist, one of 10 specialists she sees on a regular basis. Natalie has been lucky enough to receive a trial drug that keeps her tumour growth from getting worse, according to her mother, Tamara Goertzen.
One of the effects of the trial drug leaves her skin cracked, dry and susceptible to fungal infection; only CBD oil, a cannabis-based product, has helped temper the skin irritation.
But with a bottle costing about $85 to $135, Goertzen has struggled to provide her daughter with a steady supply after she lost her business, became a single mother and was forced to go on welfare. During one stretch, when Goertzen couldn’t afford the expensive oil, Natalie’s skin dried out so much it began to bleed.
Lonquist met Goertzen after watching one of the latter’s YouTube videos in which she teaches women who are struggling financially how to purchase affordable clothes in second-hand stores and still look beautiful. Soon, the women were going door-to-door, teaching women how to "thrift" in person, said Lonquist. That’s how Tristan and Natalie met.
“They kind of just bonded,” said Lonquist.
Determined to help, Tristan netted about $100 from his sale of cookies and hot chocolate. Then, as Halloween approached, “[Tristan] said, ‘Mom, I’m going to go out as Natalie’s little angel,’” Lonquist said.
When the mother and son went to Value Village to pick up a costume, an employee heard what Tristan was trying to accomplish and offered to pay (it didn’t hurt that Lonquist visits multiple times a week as part of her volunteer work).
Next, they went to Westwood Printers and had a custom sign made with a picture of the two under the banner, “Tristan’s Little Angel” — also paid for by the store, said Lonquist.
“I don’t think your son knows the effect he’s having on people,” Lonquist said one of the store workers told her through tears.
In an hour and 20 minutes of trick-or-treating, she said, Tristan had collected $220 for Natalie. That, together with the hot chocolate and cookie money, is enough for more than nine weeks of oil to provide some relief for Natalie’s skin.
Lonquist said she has now reached out to PoCo cannabis retailer burb to see if it would be interested in helping fund some of the oil for Natalie, and Tristan has asked his teachers at Minnekhada middle school if they can host a bake or freezie sale.
While they wait for answers, the two have started a GoFundMe page to raise money for an alternative drug treatment and to help the mother and daughter pay for ancillary costs such as hospital parking on their weekly visits.
“Most people are just caught up in their own lives,” Goertzen said. “It’s so refreshing to see human beings that want to make a difference.”
