Help people with blood cancer to survive COVID-19

Dear Friend,

Thank you for supporting Leukemia Foundation and people with blood cancer in 2022. With your support we answered 766 requests for help last year!

With your support many people — those, who heard "you have cancer" for the first time in their lives, and those, who have been fighting the disease for many years — found bone marrow donors, received necessary medicine and psychological help, and came back home. And they are very grateful for your help.

I cannot squeeze all the warm and sincere words they sent to you in this one letter. But I want at least to quote a few. A few words from Egor who has been fighting blood cancer for 4.5 years now. He went through a lot in those years, but he never went to despair. Because he always felt that somewhere near him are people like you. People who are ready to help and support others.

This winter for the first time in many years Egor not only came out of the hospital, but also went to a little trip. He actually is getting back to normal. And he’s very grateful for that:

“Dear Friends!

It feels like this insane world we’re living in really lacks understanding, support, helping hands, and love for each other. But those are the things that can get us through any difficulties.

I’m deeply grateful to each and every one of you. You, who supported me and other guys who got into trouble. After my long battle with the disease, I’m very close to normal life. Thanks to you. You gave me a second chance. And this is just priceless. Thank you!”

"Hi, this is Peter whose life you saved. I know I can't thank you enough, but I'd like to try."

Three years ago, Peter just turned 18 and was full of dreams. He wanted to become a chef, he wanted to try himself in professional sports, he wanted to see the whole world. They were more of plans then dreams because Peter had already started to make them real. He studied cooking in college, played football, tried other sports, and went to his first trips.

But a few days after his 18^th birthday something went wrong. He suddenly got fever and each day it was getting worse and worse. When he finally got to emergency care, half of his heart wasn’t working at all. Doctors said he was almost at death’s door.

But Peter refused to go through this door. He had too many plans for his life. After he heard the diagnosis — acute myeloid leukemia — he only asked one thing, "Is it curable?"

"Yes," answered the doctor. Peter closed his eyes, heaved a sigh of relief, and started his fight.

In the next three years he underwent many courses of chemo, a bone marrow transplant, and went into remission. But his fight didn’t end there. Few months after the transplant, he started to feel his skin was burning. It was painful to touch anything or even lay down. Peter studied his condition before, so he knew what it was.

It was graft-versus-host disease, also called a lymphocyte civil war.

Donor cells started to recognize Peter’s own cells as enemies and attacked them. Peter knew there was a medicine to help him called Jakavi. He also knew he and his mother couldn’t pay for it. So, he asked for help.

And the help came. It came from people like you, who support the Leukemia Foundation and people with blood cancer.

Thanks to people like you, Peter received his medicine, and now he can touch things again. He can lay down and sleep again. He can dream again. Then he can turn his dreams into plans, and then his plans into reality. And he’s doing it now.

 And he’s deeply thankful for that.

"My gratitude is just unmeasurable," he says. "I’m thankful to everyone who helped me buy this valuable medicine. I’m calling it valuable, not expensive, because its’ true value is not in its’ price. Its’ true value is hope. The hope you gave me. And not only the medicine is hope to me. You, you yourself are hope to me — kindhearted, caring people who help me and others in this long and hard way to health. I look up to you. I want to be like you. I know I can’t thank you enough. But I thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much!"

“Behind every appeal for help, there’s a person, a life story, a family, a whole world. The world that has been destroyed. And we’re trying to piece it back together from shatters. And it’s a very hard challenge,” says Eugenia, a blood cancer patient who recently underwent seven courses of chemo and a bone marrow transplant.

Her life changed in the blink of an eye. One sunny day she just slipped and fell down, and a few weeks later she found herself on a drip in a hospital, diagnosed with rare and aggressive form of chronic myeloid leukemia.

“The saddest thing of all,” she says, “that I’m a completely ordinary person, like millions of others, none of whom expects such thing to happen to them. Everyone thinks it’s not going to happen to them.”

She spent next 15 months receiving chemo and trying to glue the shatters of her life back together. Now she’s finally recovering after a bone marrow transplant and cannot wait to get back to her daughters and her, as she says herself, “ordinary life”.

Eugenia calls it a miracle. A miracle that couldn’t happen without the donations and support of people like you.

“This is a miracle, you made happen”, she says, “I’m deeply grateful to every caring person, who answered to my appeal. Every donation is care and support. Every donation made me feel I’m not alone. Every donation empowered me and gave me hope.
It’s hard to ask for help. It’s even harder to thank for it. Cause no words can express my emotions and my gratitude.”

Eugenia is not the only one who’s grateful for your help. More than a hundred people with blood cancer, who with the help of people like you received necessary medications or bone marrow transplants this year, say the same thing. “Your donations are not just money. They’re support, they’re hope and they’re will to fight.”

It’s definitely not the easiest year for all of us, and it’s not at all going as we (or, probably, anyone) planned or expected. But despite of all difficulties, we continue helping people with blood cancer in Russia. And as long as we feel such a great support from you, we know it’s going to work out somehow. Because we have hope and will to help.

“I know, there’s a long and hard way ahead,” says Eugenia. “But I’m already on it, because you helped me make the first and the most important step. And I just couldn’t make it without you. And I thank you for that.”