The Right Kind of McDonald’s Love

Happy out…

t’s always good to see a multi-billion dollar corporation give something back, and McDonald’s gave Zack O’Neill’s family some much-needed hospital accommodation just when the Greystones kid needed them most.

It was whilst on holiday in England that parents Adele and Alan O’Neill first noticed that something wasn’t quite right with the younger of their two sons.

A visit to the doctors met with a diagnosis of a summer cold, and that the remedy was a simple bit of rest – despite the fact that Zack couldn’t take any weight on his legs and even his voice had been affected. Back home in Greystones, Zack’s condition was getting worse, and as Adele and Alan prepared to take him to the hospital, Zack began to faint. His breathing stopped. His heart stopped.

It turned out that Zack was suffering from a very rare strain of Guillain-Barre syndrome, a condition affecting only one in 100,000 people, where the body’s immune system attacks its own nervous system.

Adele O’Neill with Zack and Ethan Pic: Damien Eagers/independent.ie

Over the coming days, with doctors warning Adele and Alan that the odds were stacked against their son, to everyone’s surprise and delight, in the second week, Zack started to respond. changing. “He squeezed my hand and gave me a smile,” Adele told independent.ie’s Chrissie Russell earlier today. “We were so excited, we kept asking him to do it.” Later, the parents asked Zack if he’d like a Barbie for his birthday. He was quick to respond with a headshake that, no, he didn’t want a Barbie. When they asked Zack if he’d like a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle, “he nodded a bit harder – we knew then we’d got him back. It was his personality”.

Adele and Alan had some tough changes to make, the former quitting her job as a primary school teacher, the latter his job as an IT project manager. There was also the realisation that their other son, 7-year-old Ethan, had been devastated by this sudden turn of events too. And this was on top of all the medical bills.

Luckily for Adele and Alan, one of Zack’s medical team had put their son forward for a place in the Ronald McDonald House Charity, which provides long-term accommodation and support for families all over the country while their children are being cared for at Our Lady’s Children’s Hospital in Crumlin. The organisation relies on donations for its €400,000-a-year running costs, and tomorrow, Sunday, €1 from every Big Mac sold in Ireland’s 89 McDonald’s outlets will go towards supporting the Ronald McDonald House Charity.

It meant Adele, Alan and Ethan could stay in a three-bed family room in a 16-bed house with ensuite, just five minutes away from Zack, should he need them, staying there two months before a bed opened up for their son at the National Rehabilitation Hospital in Dun Laoghaire. The now-4-year-old Zack continues to improve all the time, his sight having returned, and since July, he no longer needs to be tube fed. And for Adele, that’s largely thanks to the Ronald McDonald House Charity.

“When you’re going through hell, you need the comfort and unity of your family around you,” she says. “Ronald McDonald House was able to give that to us. The second we moved in, it gave us a sense of normality back and it felt like the nightmare had ended.”

You can donate to the Ronald McDonald House Charity here, or at any of the fundraising boxes in McDonald’s across the country. The nearest one is Bray. For now. You can read the full article in today’s independent.ie here.