UPDATE – £4,633 has been raised for Dasha including offline donations. Thank you very much for your support!
Dasha Rizhakova
Date of birth: April 8, 2015
Residence: Saratov, Russia
Diagnosis: Ganglioneuroblastoma.
Dasha will be four in a couple of months. It looks like she’ll be celebrating her birthday at the Dmitry Rogachev Centre for Paediatric Haematology. Dasha is still so little, but her body is “host” to a large spinal tumour, a subtype of neuroblastoma called a ganglioneuroblastoma. Doctors discovered the tumour during a scheduled ultrasound scan in 2017. An operation in her hometown didn’t help, and the tumour kept growing. That was when Dasha was brought to Moscow for treatment. She’s undergoing a course of chemotherapy and preparing for a second operation.
Complications of cancer treatment
Dasha’s struggling with her treatment, and often suffers from pain in her legs. She’s developed severe aplastic anaemia, which in turn has caused infection-type complications. For a long time, Dasha couldn’t even leave her ward to go out into the hospital corridors. Within those four walls, there is nothing for a young child to do but play with dolls and watch cartoons. Still, Dasha and her mother are working hard to keep their spirits up.
Help us saving Dasha
The Dmitry Rogachev Centre has invited Prof. Ulrich Thomale from the Charité clinic in Berlin to perform Dasha’s surgery. He is a specialist very familiar with this kind of illness and has already studied her case history. Now he’s ready to come to Moscow. But while bringing a foreign expert to the patient’s hospital is, of course, much cheaper than sending the patient to Germany, it’s still more than Dasha’s family can afford.
The operation will cost £4,633, and they won’t get there without donors to help them. Let’s support Dasha together. Thank you!