Double hope

They have everything in common - toys, friends, genetic code. But one fights with school tests, and the other fights with the brain tumor

We help genetic studies for children with brain tumors collected 2,871,900 R required 3,000,000 r

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Gemini is always some kind of magic. They are like two drops. Olya and Sonya - two drops of a combustible mixture. Equally explosive, they share everything - from room to friends. In their eight, Olya and Sonya are quite clearly fantasize about the future:

“I will be a doctor for animals,” says Sonya.

“No, this is my profession,” Olya will recall her. - I will treat them and iron them! I will have an eagle in the house when I grow up.

- You can’t iron it!

-Well, actually yes, but I will tame him. Will sit on my shoulder. I will start myself a braid, ferret and beaver. I will walk the beaver on a leash and feed with already cut down trees. I’ll ask a horse -drawn one from the builders. Well, the bestial. Small or large. For wintering and for summer.

-Have you ever been to the zoo? -I ask the fantaser sisters.

“When Olya was random, we lived in Moscow for a month and managed to go,” recalls Sonya.

Sisters photo: Oksana Yushko for TD Unlike sister, Olya spends most of the time at home photo: Oksana Yushko for TD Olya in a children's photo: Oksana Yushko for TD

In April of this year, sisters and her mother lived in Moscow for a month (they themselves from the Bronnitsa near Moscow), only Olya every day after breakfast went to the procedure, where she was put on a special protective mask to protect the healthy part of the head from irradiation. For this, she received from her relatives the nickname "Girl in a net." Twin sisters always lived the same way, but two years ago everything turned over. Olya found a brain tumor. Now she has something that her sister does not have - radiation therapy and a new nickname.

Girl in a net

The sisters together went to first grade. By the end of the second quarter, closer to the New Year, Olya began to feel unwell. She was sick, but they did not find the reason: at first they thought that she was poisoned by berries, then that she was overwork. When they made an MRI, it turned out that a tumor was growing in the left hemisphere, already six by six centimeters. Two days later, Olya was operated on. Then she was lucky, and the tumor was not malignant.

“They said they were deleted total,” says the mother of sisters Marina.

The terrible dream ended, and the girls continued the usual life of first -graders, only Ole had to catch up with a lot to study. But six months later, the tumor returned. And this time she “got angry” - became malignant, more aggressive, changed the structure and became more resistant to therapy. Oncologists said - alas, it happens.

Twins Olya and Sonya photo: Oksana Yushko for TD

Olya transferred more to the school third quarter than an ordinary second -grader. After two operations and chemotherapy on the right, she has still luxurious thick hair, and on the left is a black hedgehog. Olya does not disguise him and protests against her hair to her hair on the other side - even for her birthday, she did not allow her girlfriend to make another hairstyle.

- Netshki. I don’t need to, I don't want to.

Olya and Sonya also have an older brother Artem.

- Artem says: “If Olka loses her hair, I will shake too hard!”

The question is unanswered

When the disease comes to the house, many families do not withstand, break up. But this family is not weak. They have already experienced so many things together. The twins were actually born in the village next to the Sayano-Shushenskaya hydroelectric power station, where their parents built a coastal water clutch. At the end of the work, they moved further with their construction detachment - first to Adler, then in the suburbs. Now we settled in Bronnitsy. Marina torments herself - maybe it was not worth changing the climate so sharply? Maybe this is the reason for the tumor?

But even doctors do not even have an answer to Marina’s question. Why in young children a tumor begins to grow in their heads - medicine is still incomprehensible. It is the brain tumor that takes the second place in terms of prevalence among cancer in children. Every year in Russia, tumors in the head, like Olya, have another 1200 children.

Olya and Sonya play Sonya, Olya and Mom Marina Photo: Oksana Yushko for TD Olya and Sonya photo: Oksana Yushko for TD

The worst of all is unknown. It is impossible to understand why the tumor has appeared, but you can investigate what exactly happened in the child’s body in order to treat it more effectively. The brain tumor is a breakdown in genes. To detect a mutation, a molecular genetic study is carried out. To identify mutations, a tumor is taken and DNA sequencing is carried out. It is important to explore mutations - this will help develop the tactics of the fight against the tumor: against each mutation, its weapons and a different intensity of its use. The study is expensive, and many families cannot pay it themselves. Ole was done by such an analysis thanks to the charity fund of Konstantin Khabensky.

If the mutation is found, the patient is taken from the vein and see if there is the same mutation in lymphocytes. If there is a mutation there too, it is most likely herminal, that is, it was contained in the genome of germ cells. This means that neither the lifestyle nor the crossings could provoke the growth of the tumor.

Ctrl+C.

Before the study, in addition to guilt for frequent moves, Marina was tormented by a question about a healthy daughter - what if Sonya will get sick? He and Olya are monozygous twins full of genetic copies. But molecular genetic analysis can help answer this question.

- The genetic material in the same -eating twins completely repeats each other and differs in multi -tier ones. The probability of the implementation of the breakdown in the Gemini genes is small, but it is, ”says Andrei Levashov, a researcher at the chemotherapy department of hemablastoses with a group of neuroncology of the National Medical Research Center for Oncology named after N.N. Blokhina. - Especially if the brother or sister has a germinal mutation. A patient with a tumor should be examined for the presence of hereditary syndromes, as well as check the blood of the second twin for the presence of the same mutation.

Olya in her room photo: Oksana Yushko for TD Olya in her room photo: Oksana Yushko for TD Olya photo: Oksana Yushko for TD

Find out about mutations in genes - whether they are the same for twins - the study that the fund paid for. And, whatever the result, the worst thing will disappear - the unknown.

Build again

In a house where there is a sick child, attention is never divided equally. Sonya also suffers from her sister's illness - she listens to adult conversations and worries that she can not help her most important girlfriend. And Olya is jealous that Sonya plays bouncers and runs crosses, and she only looks.

Mom says that the characters of the twins are different: Olya oscillatory and mischievous Sonya. But when we come to visit the girls, they both cheerfully rush around the apartment, conduct a tour of their pink-sprinkle room, show video bloggers from the tablet, grimaced in front of the camera ...

Olya and Sonya look at their children's photos photo: Oksana Yushko for TD

“You open to me from a new side,” says Ole's mother. “I tell everyone that you are calm.”

“I can be different, mother,” Olya says seriously.

It is not even clear yet whether Olya will return to one class with Sonya. Recently, Ole was re -made an MRI - the tumor does not want to give up yet. The third operation loomed ahead, and after such operations, sometimes paralysis occurs.

“But she can write anyway,” says Marina.

Yes, now she rejoices that her daughter is left -handed, because the left hemisphere (where the tumor) is responsible for the work of the right half of the body.

Olya photo: Oksana Yushko for TD Olya and Sonya photo: Oksana Yushko for TD Olya photo: Oksana Yushko for TD

- She is generally persistent with us. A couple of days after the first operation, she was already running with hospital clowns, and a month later she had already returned to school.

While her best girlfriend, sister and genetic copy are fighting school tasks and tests, Olya’s and struggle, and tests are completely different. But when the unknown does not take additional forces, they can also be spent on fighting the disease. Therefore, the Constantine Khabensky charity fund has been paying for molecular genetic studies for children with brain tumors. Parents understand what is happening with their child, and doctors can change the treatment tactics in a timely manner so that it becomes more effective. In 2017, more than sixty children were supported with the support of the research fund. Please subscribe to monthly donations - and there will be more such children.