9-year-old sells lemonade to raise money for baby brother's treatment, makes $6,000 in 2 hours
A nine-year-old boy from South Carolina was able to raise almost $6,000 to help cover the medical expenses for his sick baby brother, all by selling lemonade!
Andrew Emery decided that he wanted to help his parents out with paying for his brother's speedy recovery after the infant was taken to the hospital due to a rare neurological condition that he had developed.
The sweet young kid had some help and set up a lemonade stand in Greenwood on May 26 at a used truck dealership.
He managed to make almost $6,000 in only two hours after his stall started selling the lemonade.
The lemonade was sold at the stall and there were also t-shirts with the hashtag #TeamDylan at the venue for sale to support his sick baby brother.
The boy managed to raise $5,860 in funds from the lemonade stall, $1,300 from a benefit concert that happened the previous day and another $5,600 from a GoFundMe page that was set up for baby Dylan.
Emery told The Index-Journal in an interview, "I'm gonna spend it on doctor's bills and stuff and buy him a teddy bear too. I just want to help Dylan. He's my baby brother."
The infant is at a hospital in Pittsburg at the moment. Dylan was diagnosed with Krabbe disease which is a rare and often fatal lysosomal storage disease which results in progressive damage to the nervous system.
The average life expectancy of a child with this deadly disease is said to be just two years but Dr. Escolar, the director for the Study of Neurodevelopment in Rare Disorders program at Children's Hospital of Pittsburg, said that most of her patients have lived to about five or seven years of age before dying of an infection from pneumonia.
Emery told the publication that he had always wanted a baby brother and the excitement became all too real when his father Matt and mother Melissa told him and his two sisters that they were expecting another child.
The young boy said: "I wanted her to have a boy. There's too many girls at home."
Emery, who is in elementary school, keeps a watchful eye on his infant brother through Facetime while he is being treated in the hospital.
Emery said that he has many plans for himself and his baby brother after Dylan is finally discharged and brought back home from the hospital.
He said: "I'm going to hug him."
A Facebook page titled Team DYLAN has been set up on the social media site to keep all the well-wishers up to date with baby Dylan's progress.