Parents sell daughter to fund medical bills
- Source: Global Times
- [17:47 March 29 2010]
- Comments
Li Qiqin holds her five-year-old daughter who has leukemia in Quancheng Square in Jinan, Shandong Province on Sunday. Li and her husband are hoping a family can adopt their child and help pay the medical expenses for a bone marrow transplant.
When the Hematology Hospital of the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences in Tianjin told the Wang family that it was ready to perform a bone marrow transplant for their sick daughter, the couple was not happy at all.
Holding their five-year-old daughter diagnosed with leukemia in Quancheng Square, a landmark site of Jinan, Shandong Province, the Wangs made an agonizing decision on Sunday – anyone who is willing to adopt their daughter and pay for the expensive surgery will be rewarded with 100,000 yuan ($14,645), the only money the couple has to pay for the child’s illness.
"Who would give up their own child? But there is nothing I can do. She is so sick and I have run out of friends and relatives to borrow more money," explained the helpless father Wang Qihai, his wife sobbing behind him.
The pale, wavy-haired girl Wang Ziqing looks no different from any other healthy child except that she always has to wear a mask on the face to prevent being infected by a virus because of her weak immune system. As she smiled, one could see her big innocent eyes smiling too and she occasionally played with a toy tiger. Unaware of how serious her illness is, she reached out her hand to wipe her mother’s tears.
On January 27, Wang Ziqing suddenly came down with a high fever and a bleeding nose. After being transferred from Jining People’s Hospital to Beijing Children’s Hospital, she was finally diagnosed with severe aplastic anemia, also known as leukemia, and was recommended to be hospitalized and get a bone marrow transplant.
"The news came like a bombshell and I felt like I was struck by lightning," Wang told the media.
With a pile of hospital receipts lying on the ground, he said the family already spent about 80,000 yuan for her treatment, of which 50,000 yuan was borrowed from relatives. It was a huge sum of money for a family with the husband with a casual job working as a miner for the local mine in Zoucheng and a jobless wife. The family struggles to live on 2,000 yuan a month.
In early March, the hospital told the couple the little girl's blood stem cell matched her sister's and suggested a bone marrow transplant. Although the elder sister's school made a donation, the surgery will cost 300,000 yuan, far more than what the poor family can afford.
