Although the future is uncertain, the mother will not stop trying to save her daughter – Photo: Binh Minh
Truong Thi Phuong Dung (Han’s mother) recalls that in 2021, baby Ngoc Han suddenly developed a high fever, staggered, always complained of a headache, and then vomited. I took my child to the doctor in Cai Le city (Tien Giang) for treatment for about two months, but there was no result.
Ms. Dung made the decision to transfer her daughter to the Tien Giang Provincial General Hospital. Upon receiving the result that her child had brain cancer, the young mother was in shock and wanted to collapse.
Why is my fate like this?
It was a sentence the young mother repeated countless times during the conversation, wiping away tears. In 2007, she gave birth to their first child. Four years later, when she was 5 months pregnant with her second child, her first daughter fell into the river and did not survive.
Ngoc is the third child of the Han couple. During the days of Han’s pregnancy, Ms. Dung knew that her husband was having an affair, but still hoped that he would change his mind and return to the children. No wonder the man took off his shirt and left when Baby Han hadn’t left the crib yet.
Two months ago, Grandpa Ngoc Hanh was diagnosed with tuberculosis. Grandma has stage 5 chronic kidney failure.
“I think I love my kids, so let’s slowly let him cool down, let him go and go back to his wife and kids, nobody expected him to go!”, she said. . In 2018, when officially going to court for divorce, the husband promised to support Ms. Dung and their two children, but has not kept that promise until now.
Divorced, she has nothing but an armpit and two young children. There is no land near the house. Even the house you live in is a rental. Every day at 3:00 in the morning, the young mother had to stay awake, packing things continuously to go to the fish market to sell fish.
At 10 o’clock in the morning, the stock ran out, everyone ran home to take care of their two children, so that at 2 o’clock in the afternoon, they put the fried fish balls in front of the house to sell. Dung said, “I just want to be healthy and work hard enough to be able to raise two kids.”
father’s promise
It’s been two years since Ngoc Han began her journey to fight brain cancer. After many treatments and surgeries, the girl who was beautiful, lively and weighs around 30 kgs is now only 15 kgs, cannot control urine, has to help her mother wherever she goes.
The day she heard that Han was ill, his grandmother adopted her eldest son so that Dung’s mother could spend all her time taking care of Han. Mother and daughter rented a small room at a temporary living cost of 100,000 VND per day, except during treatment time at Ho Chi Minh City Oncology Hospital, Facility 2 (Thu Duc City).
The room was small, just enough space for the mattress and little space to move around. How much money the donors donated, she spent to buy milk and delicious food for her children, and I asked for rice in charity.
She said that when Han first got sick, she still dared to go back and forth, taking advantage of selling fish in the market. But Han’s condition was getting worse and worse, his strength was getting weaker, so why did he leave the child alone, so he stopped running and could no longer trade.
Brain surgery, Han remembers when he forgets. But with her relatives, Han forgot no one, even her father, who she had not seen for many years.
Though the pain will always haunt her, her blood and blood are sacred, how can she stop missing her father, even though she now has a new family.
At that time, Han asked his father to call again, he kept calling all the time, but sometimes his father picked up the phone, sometimes he didn’t. Han asked his father to go to Saigon to take his son home, he promised, but since Han was hospitalized in Saigon, the father never visited his son.
“I don’t have land, no house, can’t work to earn money. Grandparents and Baby Han are both sick. She doesn’t know what happened to her, she keeps asking to go back to school. She Watching, thinking of her life, I see fog ahead”, Ms Dung regretted.
worst time of my life
Ms. Dung said she has never forgotten a moment of the day she took her daughter to the provincial hospital and received the news that she had cancer.
Right in the midst of the COVID-19 outbreak, Han and his mother were separated for 8 hours before being transferred to Children’s Hospital 2 (HCMC) in Tien Giang for emergency surgery at night.
“It was almost dawn when I reached the city. I didn’t even have a thousand in my pocket at that time. I was carrying a shopping cart, I didn’t have sandals on my feet. In a strange place, my baby was having emergency surgery, I I couldn’t walk, I didn’t know who to ask, whom to ask for help, I could only cry!”, Dung recalled.
(tags to translate) baby Vo Nguyen Ngoc Han
