Piyush - Update 1

Yesterday I wrote to Piyush's father, Mr. Maltesh Kolur and Me & Hubby landed at their residence in Aundh at around 6:30pm. The doors to their house and their neighbours were open. There were couple of people in the house who surrounded around a laptop into some serious stuff. We were seated in the neighbour's house and maltesh joined us soon. He was glad we visited and spoke to us about his son.

Piyush was first detected with Leukemia in 2004 when he was 4 years old in Apollo hospital Delhi. He needs to undergo a bone marrow transplantation for completely recovery. Piyush is a single child and hence needs an external donor. External donor bone marrow transplant is not done in India. When the family started exploring their options with hospitals & cost associated, US was the first but it costed around 2 crores Indian Rupees plus the stay and airfare. France was the second option, and now recently they have contacted a hospital in Singapore and that seems more feasible because of the proximity to India. Find more details at www.cpaaindia.org and www.aidmyson.org

About Piyush, his condition is stable right now and according to the doctors this is the right time to do the transplant before a relpase happens. They plan to go to S'pore within 10 days just as soon as they can collect the money and get a confirmation on the date from the doctors there. I had also written to the cancer patients aid association (cpaaindia.org) in Bombay and have their confirmation on the case as well.

Also, while we were leaving, Maltesh offered to call Piyush. He came and stood at the entrance of his room and we were still standing outside. He has lost his hair. He waved a shy "hi" to us, smiling. We waved back. He needs to be protected from any kind of infection at this point and so the isolation from visitors.

Lastly, I really dont want to create a sympathy wave because they are a normal family like any of us with jobs like ours. Money as huge as this is just not easy with anyone and if God forbid, we are faced with a similar situation tomorrow we all will need to turn to the whole wide world for help for our child's sake, for our own sanity. We can not control a lot of thing but I hope to God, money does not stand as an obstacle to the little one's well being.

The cost of the transplant is around INR 1.25 crores plus accommodation & airfare. They have managed to insert an half hour program through Star News and running footages at CNN-IBN. Maltesh, himself has scrapped his bottom to pull out INR 25+ lakhs. They have collected around 70lakhs in total. But they need an another INR 50-60lakhs to get them going ASAP.

Please visit www.aidmyson.com or www.cpaaindia.org and make your contribution big or small. Please link to the above sites on your blogs and help reach out to as many people as we can.