For the past few years, Port Robinson residents Joelle McCullough and her mother Agnes have both been battling cancer.
The support they received during this difficult time has inspired them to help organize a bottle drive for a one-year-old Welland boy, Evan Mack, who was recently diagnosed with a rare degenerative disorder.
“For the last year both [my mom] and I have been going through cancer treatment,” says McCullough, in an interview with ThoroldToday. “We ourselves have gotten a lot of help with people dropping off dinners for us and watching the boys. We sort of wanted to give back to a family that is close to us.”
McCullough heard about Evan’s story through his aunt Stephanie, who happens to be McCullough's babysitter.
“Stephanie has been directly involved in my cancer treatment, just watching the boys over the last couple of years,” McCullough says. “We were around when Evan was first born, kind of following through Stephanie what was going on.”
Evan’s mom, Teanna Curcio, says that a lot is still unknown about Evan’s condition.
“He was born completely healthy until about a month old when he started having multiple seizures a day,” explains Curcio. “KCNC1 is the gene that has been affected. It’s still opened a lot more questions because the prognosis is still unknown. We’re just focusing on helping Evan. He has a lot of catching up to do so the more therapy he has now, the better the prognosis.”
Evan is currently enrolled in SMILE Therapy, a program run out of Burlington.
“It’s an intense version of physiotherapy,” Curcio says. “Evan went for five days and prior he couldn’t stand at all. After the five days he could stand up against the wall. It was amazing the difference it made.”
Curcio hopes that the bottle drive will allow Evan to have as much therapy as he needs.
“We’ve exhausted our private insurance,” she says. “It’s $130 an hour and he goes at least two hours every time we can take him. As his mom, I know he’s going to face lots of challenges. If I can make it better in any way, I want to.”
McCullough got involved with the bottle drive because she wants her two sons, Jacob and Liam, to learn about helping others in the same way that her family has been helped.
“This is a great opportunity to teach them about doing something for someone else, in a tangible way they can actually see,” McCullough says. “When you’re just donating the money they wouldn’t understand because they’re only five years old. ”
It’s been a rough couple of years for the McCullough family. McCullough continues palliative chemotherapy for appendix cancer, while her mother Agnes just finished treatment for an aggressive form of breast cancer.
Undertaking a bottle drive in the midst of an intense chemotherapy round isn’t always easy.
“We’re kind of in the grind,” McCullough says. “Every two weeks I have my chemo and I’m down and out for a few days. Where do we find the time to actually give back to the community and to the people that are following our story? It’s just one of those things where you want to make it work. You want to push through because it’s worth giving that little bit of extra energy to be able to do that stuff.”
All McCullough wants to do is pay it forward.
“I know that our story is very difficult and hard but at the same time we had so many blessings,” she says. “It would be wrong to hold it all to ourselves. Teanna’s family, they have been through a lot as well, and you can see they have that same kind of positive attitude. It’s easy to want to expand on that.”
The bottle drive runs until May 28th. McCullough has a set up a blue donation bin at 35 River Street in Port Robinson. If you would like to donate your bottles directly to Curcio, you can email her.
