Owner Selling Restaurant to Help Ailing Teen Worker

Brittany Mathis has tumor, no insurance
By Matt Cantor,  Newser Staff
Posted Jan 9, 2014 8:20 AM CST
Owner Selling Restaurant to Help Ailing Teen Worker
In this photo from Jan. 3, 2014, Brittany Mathis, left, and De Beyer pose for a portrait at Kaiserhof Restaurant in Montgomery, Texas.   (AP Photo/The Courier, Jason Fochtman)

A Texas man is selling the restaurant he's owned for 17 years—which he figures is worth some $2 million—to help a 19-year-old employee handle her mounting medical bills. "I'm not able to just sit by and let it happen. I couldn't live with myself," Michael De Beyer, owner of the Houston-area Kaiserhof Restaurant and Wunderbar, tells the Courier. Waitress Brittany Mathis was diagnosed with a brain tumor after visiting the hospital with a rash on her leg, KHOU reports. "It was my blood clotting," Mathis says. "So, they wanted to keep me and do CAT scans and MRIs and the next day they came in and told me I had a tumor."

The tumor is the size of a ping-pong ball, the Courier reports. But Mathis doesn't have insurance, and she hasn't yet signed up for ObamaCare. According to CBS Houston, her treatment has stopped amid growing costs, and she's not yet sure if the tumor is malignant or benign. But her father died after a brain tumor ruptured in 2000. "Here's a family, they really work hard they have a lot of stuff against them in the past, and they are not holding their hand open. They didn't even ask anybody for help," De Beyer says (Mathis' mother and sister work at the restaurant).

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