Cancer Kids Ukraine

On my way to the Cancer Institute, where I was supposed to meet Stas and his mother Elena, I was thinking about where I should go to ask for help for this teenager. I already knew that Stas is a grown-up boy, if that’s what we can say about a 16-year-old teenager, that he is not very sociable, that he comes from a low-income family. His mother is a woman with sadness but hope in her eyes. She had very hard times telling me a story about her son’s sickness. Last year Stas started complaining about pain in his leg. But nobody paid attention to that. Who would panic about a bruise? But several months later, when the pain became unbearable, Stas went to the hospital, where he was diagnosed with Ewing’s sarcoma. He started the treatment in Kharkov. Now he is in Kiev undergoing the chemotherapy. He has a lot of complications. Stas became even less sociable. He doesn’t want to talk even to his younger brother. When Elena started talking about her younger son, who is only 4 years old, she started crying. Her younger son is now at home with her husband.

When Elena talked to him over the phone, he said, “Mama, you left me. You didn’t come even for my birthday!” I cannot even imagine how much it hurts for a mother to hear things like that. But Elena explained to her younger son that Stas had a sore leg and had to stay at the hospital for a while. And the kid understood. Stas needs to have chemotherapy, surgery, collection of the stem cells, and one more chemotherapy.  The family doesn’t have money even for food, not to mention the medications. Stas’ father was the only breadwinner. However, he had to quit his job because now he has to look after the younger son. When Stas came to Kiev, he finally started eating meat. But there is a problem – Elena doesn’t have money to buy meat for him. Some other parents from the same hospital saw her puzzled the other day, when she was trying to make a choice what to do with the last money – to buy a little piece of ham for Stas or to save this money for medications. This family needs help so much! They need all the help they can get – financial, emotional, prayer support.