For a young child who has survived cancer, you might imagine that nothing would be better than a massive toy shopping spree to celebrate. But for 5-year-old leukemia survivor Zander Wiles, there was just one thing he preferred to spending all that money on himself: donating toys to other children dealing with the kind of cancer he faced.
After a tough battle with cancer diagnosed when Zander was just 8 months old, the boy had to undergo several rounds of chemotherapy. With the help of Helen DeVos Children’s Hospital in Grand Rapids, Michigan, Wiles’s cancer went into remission.
Their older daughter Savannah, who was 3 years old when Zander was diagnosed, stayed at home. “We just split our time between the hospital and at home with her, so we were a little bit of a disjointed family at that point in time, but we got through it, made the most of it,” Wiles said.
While the family has tried to make Zander’s childhood as normal as possible, it hasn’t always been easy. Having to start chemotherapy at such an early stage in his development left its scars. “He didn’t walk or talk much until 18 months,“ Wiles told M Live. ”His gait was wobbly. I think it was due to neuropathy from chemo.”
Throughout the whole ordeal, the family was lucky enough to have the support of the Helen DeVos Children’s Hospital and organizations like Early On Michigan, which assists children with developmental delays. “He’s a happy kid,” Wiles told M Live. “He knows that he had leukemia, but we don’t really talk about it in terms of it was hard or anything like that, it’s just part of what he went through as a kid.”
To celebrate Zander’s remission, Burlington Stores, which is a partner and corporate sponsor of the DeVos Children’s Hospital, gave the boy the gift certificate and the chance to buy a toy of one his favorite superheros, “Batman, and Iron Man, and Fighter Man,” as he shared with WZZM.
While his mom was happy to let him pick out a toy for himself, and one for his sister, they spent the rest of the money picking up toys for all the kids like Zander still at the hospital. “It really means a lot to our family,” Wiles explained. “It means a lot to the kids in the hospital and that’s why we wanted to share the donation with the hospital because we’ve received a lot of support, so we wanted to pay it forward.”
“We are so blessed to live in this community here because we have the Children’s hospital, we have access to a lot of different organizations that helped us a lot,” Wiles told WXMI. While Zander’s particular kind of leukemia has a tendency to come back, the family has been told that if he makes it to June 2020 with no signs of relapse, he can effectively be declared cancer-free.
“We’re just really looking forward to the future and seeing what the future has in store for him,” his mother said, clearly moved by the outpouring of support for this young boy who just wants to be a kid.
