Teenage Cancer Patient Needs Your Help!
Kendra Avalos
A teenager in Succotz needs your help to seek medical attention in Guatemala. Thirteen-year-old Kendra Avalos was diagnosed with stage four kidney cancer a few years ago. In 2015 she had one of her kidneys removed. But as a part of her recovery, she needs a regular medical check-up, and according to the teen’s mom Melida Castaneda her daughter wasn’t able to go for her routine check-up all of last year. Now her mom is reaching out to the public for financial assistance to travel to Guatemala next month. Today, Castaneda told us about her daughter’s condition and why she needs the help.
On the Phone: Melida Castaneda, Mother of Cancer Patient
“So far the doctors have told me that she can live with that kidney but under certain conditions. Recently, she hasn’t been feeling too well. I took her to the hospital in San Ignacio and the doctor who did the check up, he told me Ms. Castaneda the best advice for me to give you is to take your child back to Guatemala City because we don’t have the treatments or the requirements for your daughter and secondly we don’t have any records of your daughter in the system. In 2020, we missed all the appointments. Our appointment was the first of April – financial problems and the border was closed and I wasn’t aware how to apply to travel. The second appointment was in September and we couldn’t make it and the third in October and we couldn’t make it. The doctor sent me an email and said we have to go because it is too much time that Kendra is missing the appointment and we don’t know what it is going on with her. She is not in the stage of dying but what I am asking for is the financial help for me to travel from Belize to Guatemala City. Over there we stay normally five to six days and we rent a place where to stay; the taxi fees; the passage from the bus and the food. Medical expense in the hospital itself they don’t charge – I will clarify that – as long as the hospital can do the exams but many times what they cannot do we are sent outside of the hospital which will be like the CAT SCAN; MRI; and Doppler and regular ultrasound we can do at the hospital but checkup of the heart we have to go outside of the hospital and there is where the expense start to come.”
Castaneda says she needs to raise approximately two thousand five hundred Belize dollars to travel to Guatemala on February first. The family is doing a barbecue fundraiser on January fifteenth in San Jose Succotz. If you would like to support or assist in any way, you can call Castaneda at 622-7270 or make a deposit to Heritage Bank Account Number 2-2-1-2-0-6-6.
