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Our daughter was healthy until last month, June 10th, 2005 when she had fever, around 101.3 F (38.5 C). This time we did not go to the family doctor to consult our daughter, instead she was seen by our friend prof. Arion Constantin MD from Fundeni Hospital (Romania) specialized in pediatrics. Luckily she was seen by a pediatric specialist doctor who knows well children oncology. This extraordinary medic know after the first exam that this is about hepatomegaly (enlargement of the liver) which means Hepatoblastoma, a rare type of cancer (1 in a million), but still the most frequent for the newborns. The doctor did not told us what he suspects, he just made an appointment for the next day to ultrasound examination, where we found out desperate that it's about a cancer on her liver and the doctor knew this a day before, but he would not alert us until he is 100% sure. With unceasing tears we started to search on the Internet all we could know about this type of cancer, about children who had it and first of all how could we treat it and what are the percents of success in these cases. We found a lot of cases when children did get healed and about parents who set up websites to help others in the same situation - and to whom we are thankful and praise God that we found them. We found out that since year 2000 there's a treatment protocol with high percent of success consisting in 4-5 rounds of treatments of 5 days each with citostatics (chemo therapy with Cisplatin and Adriblastin or Doxorubicin) to shrink the tumor, surgery to remove the tumor or even with liver transplant, followed by 2 more chemotherapies. After these 6-8 months there's a frequent follow up testing and after 4-5 years could be declared cancer free. Desperate as we were, we started to send mail to everybody we read about, to everybody who encouraged those kids in their pages, to medical doctors who participated in treatment and their name was on the web pages. For our surprise we started to receive responses, most of them form USA (many of them offering us free accommodation, advice), but also a doctor wrote us from Scotland's Royal Hospital for Sick Children in Edinburgh city. He responded us in the first day (Sunday) trying to cheer us up and he told us that the treatment should be started as soon as possible, but the latest after the second chemotherapy. So we kept in touch with this wonderful Dr. Pritchard, who raised our morale like Dr. Arion. For this things and this people we are grateful for God. We found out that there are 4 major groups of research and treatment groups in the world: USA, England, Germany and Japan. Since USA and Japan is too far away, from Germany we did not receive answers and the treatment is more toxic and with less success, we decided for England, more exactly Scotland, Edinburgh, Royal Hospital for Sick Children. The treatment was started at Fundeni Hospital, but there's no medication (most of them we had to buy it), there's no equipment, they can't do the surgery there, some medications are stolen, you need to know somebody at the Hematology Institute to get trombocites, erythrocytes or food, the nurses are overwhelmed with work, on the weekend the medic has not time to take care of everybody and even worse you stay scared that he'll administer trombocites today or something bad can happen overnight. We watched helplessly as after the first round of chemotherapy she had burns and wounds all over the body and we could not stop crying. So after terrifying fear that we, as parents, can't help her, and anytime a complication can occur and our 6 months old child will die before getting we can get her to surgery, we decided not to wait the second set of chemotherapy here (and we had to leave after this anyway), and since our daughter started to be strong enough for flight, we left for Scotland. We had the same problem as before: the hospital from Scotland asks for 50,000 British pounds (the treatment in Germany would have been more than 100,000 Euro), but we did not have this money, the insurance does not help and we can't get this money even if we sell our apartment, and we did not have time to do it anyway since we had to arrive to Scotland on July 18th, 2005. We don't need to have all of this money from beginning, just a part of it and as the treatment advances, the hospital will ask for the rest. Naturally we have every document if somebody wants to verify that we are telling the truth. If you think you can help us to give a chance of living for our daughter, please contact us. With respect and hope, |
