Help Cancer Patients Find Bone Marrow Donors!

We’ve had a great Bonus Day! With your help, we were able to transfer 5,000 euros to Stephan Morsch registry to initiate the donor search for Irina. Irina is a patient from Central Russia, who worked as a hospital nurse for nearly 25 years. In 2005, Irina was diagnosed with essential thrombocythopenia; ten years on, she consulted R. Gorbacheva Institute of Hematology and Transplantation in St. Petersburg due to disease progression and learned that she'd need bone marrow transplantation to recover. The donor search alone would have cost Irina and her family 18,000 euros - but thanks to your support, this amount is now 5,000 euros smaller. Irina sends her thanks to everyone who helped her in this difficult time. She is due to resume treatment on May 10.

If you want to help more patients like Irina, we would like to share a story of Inessa with you. Inessa lives in Ufa, a city on the Volga. She began feeling unwell in 2006, but it took her doctors a long time to find out what was wrong with her. Their final diagnosis was aplastic anemia. Unfortunately, last year Inessa's daughter was taken ill too, and she is still recovering after a serious fracture. Inessa's husband is disabled due to ill health. Despite all this, Inessa remains an optimist and says: "If you help someone from the heart and do not count on a favor in return, someday you'll get happiness that you've never even dreamed of!"

At present, St. Petersburg specialists are saying that Inessa needs bone marrow transplantation to get well. This means she will have to raise 18,000 euros on her own, as a foreign donor search is not covered by Russia’s state healthcare program and she only has donor matches in German registry. Inessa and her family would be very grateful for any support.

Many thanks once again – your help is invaluable and highly appreciated. May the month of May be merry for all of you!

Thank you so much for your support for our patients last year!  Our joint efforts helped us to contribute to the costs of bone marrow donor searches for 10 blood cancer patients.  They are children and adults, students and teachers who traveled to St. Petereburg from across Russia for bone marrow transplantations from unrelated donors, their last chances to beat cancer.   You can read some of the stories in our previous reports. 

Last year, Russian bone marrow donor registry had finally registered a significant number of donors - and it helped find matching donors for 19 lucky patients.  At the same time, collapse of the ruble led to more than doubling of the cost of searches abroad, and fewer patients can now afford it.  Our partner, Advita fund in St. Petersburg, had helped find donors for 99 patients last year. 

This year will not be any easier, and we hope that we can count on your continuing support. With February 14th around the corner, would you pick one of the patients as your Valentine?  Maybe you could consider Vyacheslav, a young man from Krasnoyarsk studying to become a civil engineer.  Since 2014 Slava has been suffering from lymphoma and undergoing numerous chemotherapy cycles, but his disease continued to progress.  Recently, he received therapy with a new drug that helped him control lymphoma, but he now needs bone marrow transplant from a donor to keep it from coming back again.  And he needs our help to make it happen. 

Thanks again for your kindness, and have a very happy Valentine's day!

Links:

• Patient list on Advita Fund website