I recently found out what became of a dear little girl Yasmin (I've changed her name to protect her identity). I thought I'd share a little bit about her here since she was supposed to have a bone marrow transplant...
As I write this my heart is filled with a sadness I cannot explain in words. I can still picture Dana and Haitham, the Lebanese couple who had an ailing eight year old daughter, Yasmin, being brought in to the hospital, the Policlinico San Matteo, in Italy.
After spending a month in the Italian hospital and going through chemotherapy for her chronic leukemia, the doctors in Italy had told her that she had no hope left. The parents, Dana and Haitham either had the option of putting their daughter, suffering from leukemia, fighting it with successive chemos, since the past five years, to go through an experimental bone marrow transplant (the effects of which were completely unknown and so risky that there was a likelihood that she could have abnormalities or severe complications for the rest of her life)…or they could take her home. I remember Dana’s words, four months ago, when she was telling me all that the doctors had finally told them. She said, ‘They want us to wait and take her home. And I’m supposed to sit home and wait for my daughter to die? Just like that…Why did my daughter have to come so far away from home to go through so much suffering?...’.
I think some amount of reason prevailed and Dana and Haitham decided then that they would rather go back home to Lebanon, to their little three year old daughter Tammy. They wanted to let the two little sisters play together and be together for possibly the last few months or weeks of Yasmin’s life. Nobody knew when she would go, when she would die. Just that it was near the end…
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