Holding up 5 little fingers, my 3.5-year-old daughter Ishwari often asked me, “Aai, if I have 5 apples and 3 fall off, how many am I left with?”, After doing the subtraction herself, when she holds two fingers in front of me, I scream “Four!”. She bursts into a laughter and says, “Aai, you always get it wrong! It’s 2!” My daughter is very talented. Unlike other children her age, my Ishu never got a chance to go to school. While she’s very sharp mentally, her body is extremely weak. Her weight is low, height is less and the structure of her head is small compared to other children her age. Last year, we found out that the cause of this, is an ailment called Fanconi Anaemia.
It’s a condition that affects the body’s ability to produce any type of blood cells. If not cured, the production of blood can stop completely. The doctors said that because my daughter had a higher stage of this ailment, the only solution we had was a bone marrow transplant. But what came with this solution, was an amount that a simple family like ours had never dreamt of - a staggering Rs. 25 lakh. Looking at our financial condition, we asked for a month’s time to gather this amount that promised to save her. After getting immense support from our relatives, wellwishers and our first fundraiser on Ketto, we gathered the money required for the haplo BMT on 24th February 2018. We exhausted everything we had to make this a reality. |
