Parents will do everything in their power to protect their children from the worst, but what if they couldn’t?
In October 2016, at the age of just 15 months, Zarah Gouge was diagnosed with childhood acute lymphoblastic leukemia. Since then her family says Zarah has been admitted to hospital more times than they can count.
The now two-and-a-half-year-old toddler has had to endure chemotherapy treatments and her mother quit work to be her full-time care provider.
The family lives in Kamsack and will continue to return to Saskatoon for Zarah’s treatments likely until next spring.
“After April of 2019, every month we still have to come back and she’ll get her blood work done,” said Zarah’s mother Britney Durell.
“It’s a lifetime of worry.”
So far the family of five has been managing the best that they can and Zarah’s father, who works construction, tries to there every time his daughter is admitted to hospital.
“It’s getting pretty hard, you gotta worry about trying to work all the time and when the next bill is going to come and if we can pay it or not,” Richard Gouge said.
“You don’t know what’s going to happen one minute from the next.”
What was next was something they never expected.
Britney just had a health crisis of her own and required a hysterectomy two weeks ago.
“As soon as that next report is back it will go over to the radiation team, the chemotherapy team, the pathology team and they will decide what the protocol will be.”
Depending on the results, she’s been told she may need radiation and chemotherapy if the cancer is still present.
A fundraising page has now been set up so the family can strictly focus on their health. For Britney that maybe hard; as a mother she says she will always want to put Zarah first.
“Everybody always says ‘Britney, I don’t know how you do it’ and I say ‘I have to I have no other choice.'”
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