Andy Gonzalez has been described as intelligent, hardworking, generous, family-oriented, and deeply involved in his children’s lives and baseball activities. But he and his family now struggle with the affects of Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS)—also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease.
Andy has lost the ability to move his limbs, to talk, and to control his body. Lizz is his primary caregiver. She described the impact of the ALS diagnosis on the family, along with her thoughts of appreciation for the friends, family, and neighbors who have helped the family through the struggle.
Lizz grew up in Mexico — her family moved to Dallas when she was 18, and she enrolled in Richland Community College where she studied design. For the last 13 years she has worked for a company that designs telecommunication towers for wireless carriers. The company does not have an office — Lizz works from home, which she considers a blessing so she can care for Andy.
“They [employers] know about our situation, so they’ve been very good to us. But I still have to get the work done. So it’s the running around, answering emails, and just trying to do everything,” Lizz said. “Sometimes it gets a little complicated.”
Andy is from Puerto Rico. Lizz characterized him as being extremely smart, a student who always made good grades in addition to excelling at baseball.
During Andy’s last year of college he played semi-pro baseball — he was a left-handed pitcher — until he was sidelined with an injury. It was then he decided to finish college rather than pursue baseball.
That decision led to Andy finishing in the top five percent of his class with a degree in industrial engineering. Lockheed Martin hired him and brought him to Fort Worth at 22-years-old. He spent 24 years at Lockheed.
Andy made a lot of friends in Fort Worth who Lizz considers family.
“He’s just a very caring person, and he will always go the extra mile for anyone and everyone. At his job, they love working with him because they knew that he will always complete the job and go the extra mile, not just complete the job. He will always give more, and he was like that for everything in life,” Lizz said.
Andy and Lizz met at a birthday party at Uncle Julio’s in Fort Worth when Lizz was almost 27 and Andy was 28.
“After the party we went to dance and we danced I’ll say all night,” Lizz said. “I didn’t know how to dance, but he loved to dance and he was teaching me, so yeah, we danced all night. But it wasn’t our time. We went our separate ways, and I would say, three months later, he called me. He got my number through our mutual friend, and we started talking. He was in Fort Worth. I was in Dallas, so we talked for like three months because he was also studying his masters, so he didn’t want to have any distractions.”
Lizz only saw Andy twice during those three months. One of those occasions was when his mom, niece, and a family friend came from Puerto Rico for his graduation. On the way to the airport Andy asked Lizz to be his girlfriend and she said “yes.”
Six months later they were engaged, and they married on June 20, 2009.
Andy played a big role in the wedding plans. “I would say he planned like 80 percent of it,” Lizz said. “He contacted the people. He would give me choices. ‘Okay, we have this, this, and this, and it’s whatever you want.’”
Their first son, Abiel, was born in 2013, followed by Giancarlo in 2015 and Elian in 2018.
“Andy was super involved with them,” Lizz said. “[He was] always caring about the kids and me, and always thinking about and putting the family first.”
Andy passed on his love for baseball to his sons, spending hours with them. Lizz has many videos of Andy playing baseball with the boys.
The family lived in Fort Worth, but they began thinking of changing locales when Abiel started school. One day Andy came home and told Lizz his boss lived in Aledo.
“What’s in Aledo?” Lizz asked.
“I don’t know, but let’s go see,” Andy replied.
“I remember there was a house for sale in the first phase of Parks of Aledo, and it was right across the park,” Lizz recalled. “I was like ‘where is this? This is heaven!’ I saw all the kids running around in the park, the parents just sitting down all together —where we were coming from, it was not like that. And I thought ‘ I want to be here. I want to live here.’ And we started looking around. There were no more houses for sale, and we went home.”
Not long after, Andy came home with the news that a third phase of Parks of Aledo was opening, so after work the next day they drove around and picked out the lot they liked.
Andy the engineer and Lizz the designer set about designing their dream home, which became a reality in November of 2020.
“The kids started making friends, and I mean I feel like everybody here in our street has been amazing to us, and they have become like family to us. Our kids are growing together, so we love it. I mean I feel like God placed us here for a reason,” Lizz said.
Andy knew the competitive nature of athletics and sports in Aledo, so he dedicated the entire summer of 2023 to training the boys in baseball. Toward the end of summer, Andy told Lizz he had tried to put something in the ground. He said he tried hitting it, but his hand didn’t have any strength.
“But nothing else hurt,” he said.
Two weeks later, he noticed after meetings at work that his left leg wouldn’t function right away. Lizz also noticed that his voice was slurring slightly. After he developed a cough, he went to the doctor and described all the symptoms.
The doctor said Andy had experienced a stroke that affected the left side of his body, and prescribed physical therapy.
But the therapy wasn’t helping.
“Every time he would leave for therapy, he was coming home worse. He was limping more,” Lizz said. “I told the doctor there’s something wrong. He’s just not getting better. He’s just getting worse. And that’s when the doctor said ‘Oh no, I hope it’s not what I think it is.’”
In April of 2024 at a special ALS clinic in Dallas it was confirmed that Andy had the disease. His symptoms in 2023 were caused by ALS, not a stroke.
By the time they visited the clinic Andy was having trouble walking, and a month later his family couldn’t understand what he was trying to say. By August he was walking with a cane, but still falling frequently. They found a small wheelchair, and he had great difficulty standing.
“I was still able to help him on everything. You know, I would use my body, pull him up, and then use my legs to move him to take him to the toilet, take him to the restroom, or give him a shower. But it was just very hard because I was juggling work and kids,” Lizz recalled.
Although unable to speak, Andy still had the use of his right hand and could communicate using a computer keyboard.
“He he never stopped working,” Lizz said. “I had to wait for him to finish working so I could take him to the restroom and wash. And that was the hardest part because he would work until one or two in the morning. I couldn’t go to sleep. I had to wait for him, and then help take him to the restroom and wash his face. That was also very hard, but he was like, ‘If I have a project to finish, I’m gonna finish it.’ — So he was taking longer, but he wanted it to get it done. He was spending a lot of time on the computer, but we were also communicating through the computer.”
He still worked using the keyboard until he could no longer control his right hand in June of 2025.
Becoming Andy’s caregiver made 2025 a challenging year for Lizz. Andy’s wheelchair was 60 pounds, and every trip (almost every day) for treatment and therapy involved Lizz having to help lift Andy into the car, folding the chair and putting it in the trunk of the car, and then reversing the procedure at their destination and repeating it back home.
“I was physically and emotionally so tired because of everything that was happening. Life was changing. I didn’t know what was next. Every day was something different, and things were just progressing, and it was a lot. It was one of the hardest years,” Lizz said.
Andy was still able to eat for a while — Lizz would give him soups or whatever she could put in a blender, and Andy was losing a lot of weight. One day he started complaining about a pain, and Lizz thought he had a kidney infection. She took him to the emergency room. where they discovered he had blood clots in his lungs.
He spent a week in the hospital, where they installed a feeding tube. By the time he left the hospital, he was unable even to stand, losing all the strength in his legs.
“That’s when a different struggle started,” Lizz said. “Because now I didn’t have anybody to lift him.” In the hospital, physical therapists and others helped Lizz get Andy to the restroom.
“Then, in May of 2025, the insurance — I don’t know — somehow that was God. They approved for us to have nurse care, 12 hours a day, every single day.”
During the time with the nurse, Lizz found relief to spend more time with the kids, but that relief ended in November when the insurance stopped covering the nurse.
“It was the end of November actually, starting December, and we struggled. We had people from our church in Dallas come in, but it’s also an hour for them, and then spending two hours because they were only helping me transfer him. But I was, you know, waiting for him to finish using the restroom, and then giving him a shower, and then putting him in the bed, and then cleaning him. Well, I was exhausted, and I still needed to work, kids, cook, everything, and we did that the entire month of December and part of January,” Lizz said.
Lizz found a way to pay one of the nurses for about 12 hours a week. She couldn’t shop or take care of any business outside the home without either taking Andy with her or having someone at the house to care for him.
In July of 2026 Andy ended up in the hospital again, this time with COVID. Following his bout, Lizz caught it and then one of the sons. About four days after Andy came home from the hospital, they were changing his clothes in the bed. When they lifted him, the feeding tube came out.
He spent another week in the hospital, and then, three days later, another problem arose.
“It was the first day of school, and I went to remove the pillows under his arm. He sleeps in that chair, so it goes all the way back. And I remember removing the pillows and just seeing blood, blood clots coming out of the incision of the feeding tube. So I tried not to panic, and I told the kids I made the lunches, and I’m like, ‘okay, I’m gonna take you to my neighbor’s house, and they can take you to school, and I’m gonna just take your dad to the hospital.’
“But I tried to stay calm because it was the first day of school. Usually, you know, we take pictures, and it’s fun, and this and that. It was different this year. It was hard.”
At the hospital they found an ulcer, and Andy was there another week.
“It was very hard now because during the summer I took the kids to my sister’s house, so I didn’t have to worry about them. It was just me with Andy,” Lizz said. “But then when they were back to school, I had to come and sleep here, take them to school, go spend the day with Andy. Coming home, picking them up, giving them dinner, and then going back to the hospital just to see Andy one more time before going to bed. And we came home, and four days later, again, the whole bleeding. Go back to the hospital. So I feel like in the past two months, we’ve just been in the hospital a lot, and the reason I think he cries also is because the ulcer that he has and the stomach, and it’s painful. And they told me it takes weeks to heal.”
When asked how the kids are coping with Andy’s illness, Lizz said they were scared.
“They’re scared about their dad and how it’s changing because I try to explain them about ALS, but every case is different. And he can easily be like that for 10-15 years. I don’t know. So that’s just something that, you know, it’s like what’s gonna happen?” Lizz said. When Andy cries out in pain, “they try to help because obviously nobody wants to see him crying. But it’s just so hard because we don’t know. We don’t know what’s going through his mind. We don’t know what the pain’s about.
“It’s heartbreaking for all of us. And I know the kids; they’re very emotional. Like they cry easy. They make letters for him. They read it to him, and they cry, which breaks my heart because they’re so little.”
Lizz finds it difficult to ask, but she has received help from friends, neighbors, and the community.
“They did a meal train for us, which has helped a lot because the cooking part, just heading to work, and then it’s 3:30. The kids come from school, and then the whole house is just crazy,” Lizz said. “They bring us meals twice a week, which is enough. They have helped us like paying the nurses and paying a therapist for our kids, and that has helped me a lot.
“We also have people come in and do our yard, which is one of our neighbors paying for it. It just little things like that that you don’t think about, but that that has been a huge help because you know just having to do that. I tell you when God put us in Aledo, it’s like He grabbed us and said ‘this is the right place for you,’ and the fact that I can leave my kids with any of these families when there’s an emergency.”
Lizz was overwhelmed when she learned that the family had been chosen as the recipient of this year’s Thanksgiving Trot. Abiel read the story to Andy from The Community News (Sept. 18) about the family being chosen.
“Andy just cried and cried. And sometimes I wonder, you know, like when you talk to him, I know he’s listening, but I don’t know where his mind is because he can’t communicate. But we both cried because God is just so so good to us.”
The Thanksgiving Trot is an annual 5k and one mile run at Tim Buchanan Stadium that raises money for a local family experiencing catastrophic medical bills.
The Gonzalez family is a family of faith despite all the challenges they have faced and will continue to face.
“I know in my heart that one day I will pay all this back, like I will do good to other people because I have seen how much it has helped me,” Lizz said. “People just show up with everything, with food, with coffee, with anything, and that’s the one thing that has taught me, so much about how to show up for someone. These people just come, and and they bring stuff, they bring food, they send money, they send gift certificates so we can eat. I mean, just things like that that I wasn’t used to, and I know it’s God just guiding our path.
“It’s just an amazing community, and God, I can see that He’s just putting everything in place for us, and I know we’re gonna be OK — and I know we’re gonna be OK because nobody’s gonna let anything happen to us — there’s people just helping us and just making sure we are okay.”
For information about how to sponsor or participate in this year’s Marcia Walters Memorial Thanksgiving Trot, visit aledothanksgivingtrot.com.
The 15th annual Marcia Walters Memorial Thanksgiving Trot in Aledo takes place on Thanksgiving morning, featuring a 5K and 1-mile fun run. Regular registration closes by midnight on Saturday, Oct. 31, to guarantee a T-shirt.
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