Every year about 6,400 new cases of leukemia and 10,000 lymphomas are diagnosed in Spain, the most common blood cancer. If facing this situation is already hard enough, let’s add the current COVID-19 pandemic. The result is that hospitals are restricting volunteer services, workshops, and basic entertainment for these patients. This in the best of cases because there are also those who have suffered a relapse due to the impossibility of treating them due to the seriousness of the coronavirus situation.
The pandemic is leaving more alone than ever patients who are battling blood cancers such as leukemia or lymphomas. Alone with chemotherapy, with side effects, with fear, with pain. Due to their immunosuppression, these patients are often unable to go out and spend months locked up in hospital rooms, isolation chambers, or at home.
Marco is only two years old and after suffering a relapse of his lymphoblastic leukemia, he has been in isolation for more than two months waiting for a bone marrow transplant . “My son cannot have his family with him, but neither can his parents together. COVID forces us to only accompany one person at each admission, we can never both be with him at the same time. Whoever stays eats all this alone, but the other who has to stay far away without seeing, without feeling what is happening, without being able to do anything, is very frustrating he I have already told you that every day we go out to the window from the hospital because like us there are more families. Sometimes they also lean out and we look at each other behind the glass and we give ourselves strength, all the strength that ours cannot give us, ”their parents say.
Lucia was diagnosed with leukemia on April 1, in the middle of the pandemic, and since then she has been hospitalized almost the entire time. “” We have not met any volunteer personally, neither the hospital school, nor the theater, nor have we had visitors. Nothing. We have been alone in the room 24 hours a day. If a situation like this is already difficult, with the coronavirus it has been even more so. But we have the best and most wonderful nurses, assistants, doctors, orderlies and cleaning staff that can exist, “writes Meri, the mother of little Lucia, five years old.
Angeles , 27, is undergoing treatment for Hodgkin’s lymphoma. A lump was found on his neck just as he was having a drink with some friends to celebrate the end of confinement. 11 days later, something that he hadn’t considered important at first had a name: Hodgkin’s lymphoma. “For a cancer patient, one of the most important things is the love of his family, friends and health personnel. Do you know what it means that neither your parents, nor your grandparents, nor anyone in your family can give you a kiss? Do you know what it means not to be able to have a beer with your friends to clear up? When someone asks me: How are you doing? My answer is always the same: I have a worse coronavirus than cancer, because I see the end of cancer, ”Angeles writes.
Esther, 25, was due to have a transplant on March 15, the second after relapsing to non-Hodgkin lymphoma. On March 11, they told him that it could not be due to the coronavirus situation. “This delay meant, in my case, a third relapse. Which meant starting a treatment again but this time alone. That is, they did not allow any companion to enter the hospital with me or anything. Luckily my nurses and my hematologists are charming people and have been with me throughout this process.
In the end, the day I was admitted, on June 27, they told me that right from that day they would let a companion in for the transplant if that person tested negative for COVID. I was able to be with my mother, “writes Esther.
The Josep Carreras Foundation against Leukemia has launched the action “You are not alone” , a very special way of encouraging and emotionally accompanying all the people who are going through the difficult time of fighting cancer and their families.
Feeling lonely is one of the worst sensations that a human being can experience.
Enter the Josep Carreras Leukemia Foundation and leave your message of encouragement for leukemia patients . We are going to try to get thousands of messages of support, encouragement, and calm. The goal is to reach 30,000 messages before the end of the year: symbolically one for each new patient diagnosed with leukemia, lymphoma or other blood cancer each year in Spain.
Join the fight for life. Join in not leaving them alone.
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