No one ever wakes up knowing they will one day in 5 or 10 or 20 years will become a cancer patient. In fact, that is one thing a person would like to avoid even thinking about most of the time. The same is true for all the cancer patients today.
After hearing and talking first hand to cancer patients, we can say that finding out that they have cancer cells living in their bodies was the most traumatic experience in all of the patients’ lives. As a human being is thought to be able to accept and adapt to any conditions, such was and is not true for cancer patients. No individual with cancer wants to acknowledge that such a deadly cell is living in his/her body.
One story of a young 11-year-old boy who was a stage 3-cancer patient inspired us to start the Lifeart. In 2018, the foreigner parents of the young child brought their son to the United States with the aim of giving him a treatment in Boston. After all the check-ups, once the full best available treatment was given, unfortunately, the parents could not find the necessary $100 000 to pay to the hospital. The family, therefore, had to postpone the treatment and return to their hometown to gather/earn/ask for money.
The whole village of the child’s hometown started financially contributing to the child’s treatment. During the process of gathering money for treatment in Boston, the family, unfortunately, found out that they cannot even wait a minute longer since cancer started spreading to other parts of the body and became metastatic. It is very painful to know that the family could not return to Boston to receive the treatment they wanted to receive. Instead, due to their financial limitations had to take the treatment outside the United States.
This is only 1 of 1000s of stories from families who cannot afford the most needed care to treat their cancer. These both include international patients and U.S. patients. Such stories not only of people and their lives break us from inside out and motivate us to work harder to help the patients in need.