Luiza, such a beautiful name of a young girl who was forced to skip a period of her life adolescence. Luiza is a child with the age of an adult. At the age of 18 she speaks as a child who, starting from 2008 until now, spent only 3 months at home. While her ex-colleagues tell her how interesting the life of teenager is, she is trying to hide the white hairs and the traces left by the long years of suffering on the bed of the oncologic clinic.
She has never been a privileged child or a child with no worries. Before being diagnosed with left renal tumor (stage IV) she used to work at the neighbors every day when she came from school to bring money in the family. One day, during the summer of 2008, she came home feeling so sick that she could not even stand. She was hospitalized for appendectomy, but after the first investigations, the physicians got alarmed and sent her urgently to the Oncologic Institute in Bucharest, telling her that her condition was not too good. The situation was that while her colleagues were enrolling for high school, Luiza was enrolled in the most difficult class – the oncopediatrics class. Many long treatments with chemotherapy followed, pains that would have been felt even by the most powerful and understanding adult, that she, the little girl bore with hope. She hoped that one day she will come home and live the life of a normal child. The only difference was that, after the chemotherapy ended, she was operated on, the affected lung was extirpated and she felt even worse. Now she was no longer interned in a keeping room but she had to stay for weeks at reanimation… this way, with every day, week that passed she was told that she had to remain in the hospital for radiotherapy, chemotherapy or for any other surgical intervention, for pulmonary metastases, getting to spend her adolescence amid blood infusion pumps, vomiting in the bathrooms from the hospital, hoping after each operation that that one will be the last. The years passed by and Luiza, the child of almost 15 at the first reception, is speaking now, aged 18, about the few moments spent in her modest home. Instead, she can tell you about the three operations that she endured in three years, about three long treatments with chemotherapy, about other long treatments with radiotherapy, about the shame and shyness with which she was trying to hide her head deprived of hair when her beautiful friends visited her and particularly about the sadness that the boys from the village are laughing at her that she is so little and that her hair is falling out.
After all those interventions (surgical, chemo and radiotherapies) Luiza presents ganglionic lung metastases and bone metastases in progress. The physicians became skeptical. Luiza was sent home for another treatment with cytostatics on condition to come back again on March 20, 2012 in the Oncologic Institute in Bucharest.
The material resources for her support are used quite stringently. Each month her parents set out in good time to the pharmacies from the town in order to find, if possible, compensated drugs. Even so, they must pay a part of the treatment. In Luiza’s case, “a part of the treatment” means that during that month her portion of fruits shall be reduced, because the money that will be spent for medicines is taken from the reserve for provisions and her vitamins….Nothing is simple in Luiza’s life. Time is measured between periods of time spent between appointments for analyses, surgical interventions or in the number of drugs that she still has to take. She is listening as if seduced to the stories of the girls who go to high school, she looks fascinated at the laptop of one of the girls and she navigates on the internet when she has the occasion… She is looking as if from another world how many things she lost and she hopes from the bottom of her heart that it will come a time when she will stand up and say: It’s over! I’m healthy now and I can go to a big and beautiful high school just like the girls from my village.
