J&K needs heart and purse for its little cancer patients
Srinagar, Feb 23: She wore a neon green jutti (a merry dove shoe), torn at the seams and an old brown scarf, her short hair peeking over her forehead through it.
Her frail frame jostled around the corridor of the ward, an IV-Cannula fixed in her forearm, as carefree as she seemed.
The six-year-old girl from Ramban accompanied her ragged and prematurely aged father for a dose of chemotherapy.
Her Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia (ALL) had relapsed after four years.
Just one dose of chemo and related disposables had cost her father Rs 8000, including the registration fee at SKIMS Soura, an amount he had to struggle to arrange.
“I am a transport labourer. I load trucks. I have taken a loan for saving the life of my daughter,” he said.
While the daughter came to hear her father narrate her story, he changed his tone and said, “She has an infection in her blood which will get alright.”
He smiled a weary smile at her, while the girl went about to move around the ward again, oblivious to the financial and emotional strain her family was going through, unmindful of the reason for her acute weakness, her ashy colour and her hospital stays.
While her lively presence took attention in the room filled with the misery that cancer brings about, it was a month-old girl child that broke more hearts than anything.
Diagnosed with cancer just after birth, her family struggled on more fronts than can be imagined.
Every year, parents of around 350 children in Kashmir receive the devastating news that their child may not make it to adulthood, their lives threatened short by cancer.
Their battles are often lonely and stories are filled with struggles, financial, on top of emotional.
Doctors say a dedicated Cancer Fund for children is the need of the hour.
According to a study, ‘A Profile of Pediatric Solid Tumors: A Single Institution Experience in Kashmir carried out at SKIMS Soura’, 4.9 percent of the patients registered for cancer treatment at the institute are in the pediatric age group.
The study included 19,880 patients registered between 2008 and 2014.
In the last seven years, between 2018 and 2024, 50,000 patients were registered by Population Based Cancer Registry (PbCR) at SKIMS.
Extrapolating 5 percent of these children, 2500 children are estimated to have been diagnosed with cancers during this time. The magnitude is huge for the families who risk losing their loved ones to this disease.
Funding a cancer treatment and completing the diagnosis process fast enough to have their children stand this chance is a real fight.
For want of immediate and adequate cancer funding and for most cancer diagnosis and treatment processes falling out of the scarce insurance covers, parents are pushed to extremes. A doctor working with cancer patients said that selling off property, loans, and crowd-funding puts a question mark on the support system pediatric cancer patients have in Kashmir.
“There are some schemes that promise to reimburse the costs incurred on diagnosis and treatment. But it is often tardy, sometimes taking even years,” he said.
The social media and the roads are full of emotive appeals for crowd-funding of cancer treatment of children.
“Even before taking their step into the world, these children face unimaginable uncertainty. Their self-respect and dignity is put to parade for a bet on their lives,” the doctor said advocating a special Cancer Treatment Fund for children in J&K.
