Cancer story, and friend visiting

Today, I visited the private hospital Augusta Victoria to interview a breast cancer patient. ANERA donates very valuable medicines to the hospital’s cancer center, and I was there to do a story about this. I met with one of the patients, 75 year old Fatmi. Actually, she said that she was 80, but then checked her ID and found out that she was only 75. “What is five years in my age”, she said with a laugh.
A mother of six (and a grand mother to no less than 33), she was operated for breast cancer one year ago. Since ten, she had been treated with the medicine we donated, a hormone therapy that stops the body’s production of oestrogen, a hormone that otherwise enables the cancer cells to grow and spread. She was of course very grateful for our donation of medicines, a medicine she could never afford on her own.

I thought the story would be very sad, knowing that the survival rate for breast cancer in Palestine is well below ten percent (mainly due to a total lack of screening – when patients come in, it is often to late).
But Fatmi was such a vibrant woman, despite her age and disease. Moments like this, it feels good to work for an aid organization.

This afternoon, my friend Micke from Stockholm came to visit. He traveled her the long way, taking trains via Budapest and Istanbul, and then continuing through Syria (Aleppo and Damascus) and Jordan (Amman), before reaching Jerusalem. Great!