ENGLISH

A modest, clever, playful 8-year old boy suffering from bladder extrophy - epispadias complex, which, in actual terms, can be translated as complete incontinence.

Gabriel was operated in Romania (Bucharest and Cluj), first when he was one week old. By the age of six he had gone through six operations in Romania, whereby doctors tried to reconstruct the sphincter and to make correction on the urethra, but the concrete outcomes are still zero.

The boy uses diapers all the time and, besides the fact that his parents can hardly bear such costs, the boy’s social life is and can stay marked by incontinence and the impossibility of setting-up his own family when growing up. Now he is a thin little boy, and the diaper he’s wearing cannot be noticed through his rather large trousers… of course, he can change it by himself and it’s hard for us to imagine what’s in his soul while doing this… at school, for instance. But how will the young man feel when he is 18…?

His grand-grandmother, as she was the one that accompanied the boy all this time, has sold all she had to “pay the free-of-charge operations”. (In Romania, free services can cost a lot of money). Now she’s only sorry she didn’t know from the beginning where to go for a fair medical opinion; she didn’t know where to invest the money she had to help her grandson.
After doctors told her that there was nothing they can do and it was useless to try further, she could not resign herself and spared no efforts in obtaining an appointment for a consultation abroad. It wasn’t easy at all, but she succeeded.
In August 2009 they went to Serbia to see Prof. Sava Perovic, a famous urologist surgeon.
The answer was positive: the boy can be operated! The team of Serbian doctors confirmed that not only the incontinence problem can be solved, but also it is very likely that Gabriel will be able to have children when growing up.

Gabriel’s grand-grandmother has tried to obtain the money through the Romanian Heath Fund – Ministry of Health, but the bureaucracy could not be defeated. She went one step forward and three steps back.
But she cannot accept the situation as it is. She struggled too much to give up.
Now you may ask yourself why is only the grand-grandmother mentioned here. The boy’s parents are simple people, they just don’t know that something can be made, they don’t know how or what they should do. The grand-grandmother, for a change, is a strong and very determined woman; she never stopped searching for help and never stopped hoping.

This is the story, in brief, of eight years of frustrations, hope, desperation, pain, patience, perseverance.
Gabriel can any time make a call to Belgrade to appoint the operation that hopefully will change his life for good. He is just 12,000 EUR away from this.

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