Christina and Kevin Cordeiro: Going Above and Beyond

Parents are often willing to do anything for their kids. For Christina and Kevin Cordeiro this meant they were ready to sell his house to get their twin sons the treatment they needed to prevent them from going legally blind.

Twins Nathan and Andre were diagnosed with a specific mutation in a gene called RPE65. When they were young, they had profound night blindness and some restriction in their peripheral vision. Without treatment, their vision would decline in adolescence to legal blindness.

Five years after their diagnosis, Health Canada had approved the first one-time gene therapy for an inherited retinal disease, and though the twins were eligible for treatment, they didn’t qualify for coverage. The treatment cost more than $500K per eye.

“As parents, we started losing sleep,” recalls Kevin. “We were ready to liquidate our house to pay for treatment.”

Leaving no stone unturned, Kevin also went to his local, which represents more than 58,000 construction workers, to see if he could get coverage through his insurance. Luckily, the treatment became available to all members of the local just as Kevin and Christina were getting their house appraised.

“My dad called me at school and told me to get Andre,” Nathan recalls.

“We got worried that something was wrong, my dad was crying on the phone,” says Andre. “He told us he just found out that we were going to get the treatment to save our vision.”

Since surgery, their vision has improved. “Now I’ve been able to see planes and stars which is kind of cool, I couldn’t see that before,” says Andre.