Dubai: A five-year-old child, who was in remission from cancer, has had a relapse and is in need of a bone-marrow transplant.
The surgery which will be carried out in India in August, will cost Dh235,000 and his devastated parents are pleading for help to raise the amount.
Peter Praveen, a kindergarten student in a Sharjah school, was diagnosed with pre-B acute lymphoblastic leukaemia when he was two and a half years old in December 2012.
“Peter had a history of fever for 10 days and we suspected something was wrong. My wife, Marykutty, is a nurse with Dubai Health Authority (DHA) and I am a radiologist at DHA and, being in the medical field, we immediately took him for further medical investigation.” said Praveen Peter, his father.
After frequent admissions to hospitals he was diagnosed with leukaemia and was put under a chemotherapy and medication protocol until January 2013 when the doctors announced he was in remission. He was placed in a maintenance phase for another year until February 2015, with advice for close monitoring of his condition.
“It appeared that Peter had emerged from the challenge and we were greatly relieved. He was excited to go to school and started in April 2015. However, within three days he complained of extreme fatigue and my wife noticed bruises on his legs.
"A blood test confirmed our worst fears. The cancer had come back. Normally a patient who has a relapse after six months has a good chance, but my son’s leukaemia came back within a couple of months after remission. He is undergoing treatment and chemo cycles again at Dubai Hospital, but the bone marrow transplant that can really save his life can take place at a Bengaluru hospital,” explained the father.
So far the parents were able to get treatment free under their insurance at Dubai Hospital.
However, bone marrow transplant treatment is not available here and the parents were compelled to look for alternative places. They came back with impossible treatment costs of more than Dh600,000.
Only recently Dr Sunil Bhat of the Mazumdar Shaw Centre in Bengaluru gave them a ray of hope, offering a far more affordable cost. The family was screened for bone marrow and none of them were a match for their son. So doctors recommended they go in for the Haplo-identical transplant using the father’s bone marrow. This is a new procedure to carry out a half matched marrow transplant. Rather than wiping out a patient’s immune system before transplanting donor bone marrow, doctors administer just enough chemotherapy to suppress the immune system, which keeps patients from rejecting the donated marrow without harming their organs.
Praveen added: “Everywhere in India, there are different prices for Non-Resident Indians, which are simply not affordable. Only this hospital provided us an estimate where the total cost, including treatment and stay, will come to about Dh150,000. I recently took a personal loan to help my widowed sister. I tried to top up that loan but was unsuccessful. I am desperate to raise this money for my child who has to undergo surgery next month and am pleading with generous souls to help Peter who has been in and out of hospital in his five years of life.”