Highway of life

Blood is life. The little boy Diego from Donetsk understands this better than anyone. For him blood is a priceless treasure, hunting for which takes all his mother's efforts and money. The child suffers from a rare for Ukraine severe genetic disease – thalassemia. Regular blood transfusion is the only way to improve his health in the short term. Two weeks ago, when bombs began to detonate in Donetsk, a mother and her child were forced to leave the city... Diego literally was torn from the supply line, which supplied him with… life.

Since his birth Diego has been fighting for the right to live, fighting with a very insidious disease – homozygous beta-thalassemia. This is a genetic abnormality of the blood system when the body is unable to produce the necessary components of hemoglobin. Thus, his own blood in the body is not made enough. Gradually cells in the bone marrow are dying, heart, liver and spleen start to suffer from insufficient supply of oxygen, bones change and become brittle...

Such children with this the disease as Diego has are very rare in Ukraine. But in Azerbaijan, the birthplace of his mother, thalassemia is very common. Each month the mother brings her son to the hospital in hope of getting fresh blood instead of the died one. Each transfusion breathes force into the boy for the next 20 days, then the procedure must be repeated. And they live in a such way for years, for all their life. Usually the lives of these children are regretfully short. In 2012, Diego's spleen was removed. But this is not the salvation of the disease, but only a slight postponement.

Two weeks ago, when bombs started to detonate and fires started to break around the hospital, the mother literally tore the child from the donor blood supply line. She remembers the horrors of war in Nagorno-Karabakh, where the victims were civilians and innocent children... for a few hours she gathered belongings and went from Donetsk to their relatives in Azerbaijan. There they had a new infusion of red blood cells, although initially there were bureaucratic complications as Diego and his mother are the citizens of Ukraine.

The child has the opportunity not to be ill – a bone marrow transplantation. Today it is the only known radical treatment of this pathology. The operation can be performed in the clinic of Verona, Italy. The Invoice is 115 000 euros. This amount is huge and hard for the family where the mother raising her child alone, as the father didn't want to share the burden of lifelong treatment of the child, and he left the family. At UBB we would like to collect a part of this amount of 500 000 UAH.

We are able to breathe new life into Diego, so that the line of Life it is no longer needed. Let's combine efforts and save this baby!

 

Name: Diego V. Shukasov, born 24/11/2007

Location: Donetsk

Diagnosis: homozygous thalassemia