Olga looks like a teenage girl. Since Ann got sick, Olga has lost 15 kilograms. Ann’s disease was diagnosed as the girl was 3 months old. She’ll be 1 year old on August 2.
Photo: Vktor Kostyukovskiy
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Belief, Hope and Anna
// Ann, 1 needs marrow transplantation urgently
In two weeks, on August 2, Ann Potylitsina will be 1. She’ll spend her first birthday far from home – in St.-Petersburg’s Gorbacheva Institute for Children’s Haematology and Transplantology. Ann has congenital leukemia, and it’s only marrow transplantation that can save her. To do it, special equipment and plenty of expensive medicines is required. It’ll total one million roubles and a half.
Unlike the majority of the parents of the kids here, Ann’s mother Olga Potylitsina knows what one million roubles and a half looks like. She knows it because she managed to work as accountant after graduating from university. Accountants and cashiers are known to have little money, whereas they deal with big sums usually.
Olga actually looks like a teenager. Since Ann got sick, Olga has lost 15 kilograms. Ann’s disease was diagnosed as the girl was 3 months old.
Olga says, “We were looking forward to the birth of our first child. We prepared so much. And the pregnancy proceeded duly. Ann weighed practically 3 kilos, without 20 grams only. Then everything was OK. And at the beginning of November she suddenly got sluggish, her temperature rose, and she refused to eat. We went to the polyclinic, where they told us that we had nothing special, just malaise. Then we went to the hospital. The first blood test showed leucosis! We felt like… I don’t even know what to compare it with. How could this happen?”
No one knows how it happens. Doctors say that congenital diseases are connected with “breakages” in the organism at the pre-natal stage, and they can be caused by anything: stresses, chemicals, viruses, medicines, radiation. Perhaps, it’s a consequence of Olga’s being born and living in Semipalatinsk, a town where half a thousand nuclear tests was carried out. But it’s only a supposition. Olga knows only one thing for sure: she did her best to take care of the future child, she even left her work as she was in the second month of her pregnancy not to sit at the monitor from morning till night.
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For those who are encountering the Russian Aid Fund for the first time
The Russian Aid Fund was founded in 1996 to assistant the authors of desperate letters sent to Kommersant. We verify the letters with the help of local authorities, then publish the letters in Kommersant, Domovoi magazine and on the site www.rusfond.ru. If you decide to help, you will receive the banking details of the authors of the letters, and the rest is up to you. You just help you help. This approach has been popular with our readers. More than $8.4 million has been collected. We also organize relief efforts during national catastrophes, for 53 families of the miners who died in the Zyryanovskaya Mine in Kuzbass, 57 families of the policemen who burned to death in Samara, 153 families of the victims of explosions in Moscow and Volgodonsk, 118 families of the sailors who died on the submarine Kursk, 52 families of the hostages who died in the seizure of the performance of Nord Ost, 39 families of those who died in the Moscow Metro on February 6, 2004, 100 families who suffered losses in Beslan. The Fund is the winner of the Silver Archer award.
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We talk with Olga in a whisper, and the neighbors sharing the ward, a mother with a child, try not to make noise too: Ann is sleeping. She’s linked with a special apparatus via a long catheter tube. The apparatus measures the medicines that get in the girl’s organism, drop by drop. It’s chemotherapy.
It’s Ann’s second chemotherapy. The first one was carried out in Krasnoyarsk’s children’s hospital. It barely brought any result – an immune response – as doctors call it. Now other medicines are applied, but anyway, no matter if Ann’s organism responds, only marrow transplantation will be able to save her.
The neighboring mother nods, which means we can go for a walk and she’ll take care of the girl. So, we leave for the corridor. It’s only a dull name – a corridor. In fact the corridors in this brand-new clinic are cozy and even joyful due to the multiple pictures on the walls.
Olga says, “At night, when it’s calm, Ann’s sleep is sound. And in the day-time doctors and nurses will always come. I know it’s good, it would be worse if they didn’t visit us. And Ann has got used to it: if it’s noisy, she stops up her ears!”
Olga smiles. She seems to have no tears any more. Now she only has hope and belief. Hope for the doctors’ wisdom and belief in people’s kindness. She found and chose the clinic herself, she contacted the doctors in St.-Petersburg, she sought the quota, which, you know, you have to seek very often. And she turned to the Russian Aid Fund, because the cost of the treatment amounts to a five-year salary of her husband Andrey, who is a steward with KrasAir.
In the Krasnoyarsk hospital the doctors hardly “bothered” Ann and Olga, but it’s actually more of Russia’s national trouble, rather than the doctors’ fault. In the vast Russia there are very few clinics where the words “cancer” and “leucosis” sound a diagnosis, not a verdict.
“So, they didn’t send you anywhere from Krasnoyarsk?”
“They tried to send us to one hospital. But there they answered: inexpediently.”
“What does it mean?” it takes me time to understand it.
“It means pointless,” the mother, who resembles a teenager, replies looking me in the eye.
I don’t know what to say. Olga utters it without any emotions as if I’d asked her about milk prices in Krasnoyarsk and St.-Petersburg. And I wonder, “Did you get here by plane?”
“Yes, it was our father’s flight, and he took us here, in the institute. Surprisingly, Ann had no problems during the flight. Only when the father left, she cried for a long time. She’s her father’s daughter, she’s his copy. She asks about him every day.”
I leave the clinic, and only one word turns round in my head: inexpediently.
A year ago Ann Potylitsina came to our world. She is already able to say “mother” and “father,” she talks her language with her toys, she has three teeth and there are two more to appear soon (there might be delay because of the chemotherapy, said Olga). When it’s noisy, she stops up her ears. And she misses her father. The expediency is in Ann’s living here, with us.
Can anything be inexpedient about it?
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817.246 needed to rescue Ann Potylitsina!
Here is what head of the ward with St.-Petersburg’s Gorbacheva Institute for Children’s Haematology and Transplantology Natalya Stancheva told us:
“Unfortunately, Ann hasn’t had remission. We hope that there will be response to the second course of chemotherapy. Anyway, the girl needs stem cells transplantation. It is so urgent that we have no time to search for a donor in the international database. Her mother’s marrow is compatible with Ann’s one only partly. There is only one way out: haploid transplantation, where we’ll be able to find compatible cells of Ann’s mother using special equipment. It costs 419.246 roubles. Before the operation and after it we’ll need a number of other drugs, which total 1.2 mln roubles.”
A charity fund, our new partner, will donate 540.000 roubles. And our permanent partner, the Kapital investment group will transfer another 262.000 roubles (see the details at www.rusfond.ru). So, 817.246 is required.
Dear friends, you have already helped many kids with similar diseases. But now is the peak of summer holidays, that’s why we appreciate every your intention to donate money to Ann, even if the sum is not that big. Any donation will be accepted with gratitude.
You can transfer money to the account of Ann’s mother Olga Potylitsina at one of the Sberbank Moscow offices, and to the account of the distributor of the medicines. You can find the details with the fund.
Russian Aid Fund experts
Victor Kostyukovsky, specially for the Russian Aid Fund
All the Article in Russian as of July 18, 2008
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