Hamilton County teen uses her Make-A-Wish to give back to others

Make-A-Wish typically makes wishes come true for special young children battling health issues by sending them on family vacations or helping them meet a hero. However, it was a different story on Thursday.

Maria Lutz, 17, is a Make-A-Wish kid. The young Lady from Inlet, Hamilton County suffers from epilepsy.

The organization offered to Make-A-Wish come true for her.

In typical fashion, they told Maria to pick one of these sentence starters and finish it:
"I wish to have,"
"to go"
"to meet"
"to be"
or
"to give back."

Guess which one she chose?

"Maria told her wish granters that she wanted to establish an emergency fund through the Epilepsy Foundation of Northeastern New York to help others with epilepsy like herself to be able to afford their medications," said Bill Trigg, the Make-A-Wish Northeast New York CEO.

"There’s so many people on Facebook just begging for medication, just for one night and just one dose, ‘please’, begging and we were talking about that, and I realized why not give back instead of take," she said.

Her wish created Maria’s Epilepsy Fund, with an initial investment of $10,000.

"It will help people afford vital medications that they need to control their seizures," explained Jeannine Garab.

Make-A-Wish says the "giving back" wish is extremely rare. Learn how many times it’s happened by watching the video of Jerry Gretzinger’s story.