Help Dragana fight Multiple Sclerosis

Hello, good people! My name is Sanja, and I’ve opened a GoFundMe page to help my cousin Dragana from Serbia, a city called Kraljevo, in her courageous fight to stop the progress of a disease called Multiple Sclerosis. Multiple sclerosis is an uncertain, unpredictable, and cruel illness that drastically decreases life quality.

 

Dragana is one of the most beautiful and caring people I’ve ever met. She is a mother of a lovely 4-year-old son, Dimitrije and a loving wife, daughter, sister and auntie. She was always keen to help others and never hesitated to be there for any of us who needed help at the time. And always with a smile on her face, full of life and happiness.

 

But August 2021 brought Dragana the shocking diagnosis of MS, and the life that she knew and lived before was completely changed at that moment. Although she was diagnosed with MS in August, it is suspected that the disease was present much longer in her body.

 

 

 

In August 2021, she felt tingling from the waist down and could not move her body correctly. She ended up in the hospital in Kraljevo, where the doctors did magnetic resonance imaging of the head, neck and spine. In the head, they have found 40+ lesions. She was immediately sent to the Clinical Center for spinal fluid extraction, where the diagnosis of Multiple Sclerosis was confirmed. Since then, she has been in the hospital three times due to severe relapses, and each time she was given corticosteroids. In April, she was hospitalized at the Clinical Center Belgrade, Neurology Clinic. The doctors proposed replacing the drug Remurel with Lemtrada, which is also given to people who have leukemia. Then the replacement of blood plasma (plasmapheresis) was planned, but it wasn't done due to the poor blood picture. A new hospitalization is scheduled for June when a more potent drug is intended to be administered. Dragana's illness progresses rapidly, and she is on disability level 5. She is currently having difficulty moving and performing daily life activities.

 

To date, no cure for Multiple Sclerosis has been found, but there are treatments available that slow illness progression and help the quality of life, and we need your help. HSCT – hematopoietic stem cell transplantation is an intense chemotherapy treatment for MS. It aims to stop the damage MS causes. HSCT has proven to be very effective for people with highly active MS. It can reduce relapses and stabilise and even significantly improve quality of life for some. HSCT is done in Moscow's National Medical Surgical Center Pirogov, and we need your help!

 

 

 

Let’s put a smile back on her face again because she deserves it.

 

Thank you so much for helping Dragana!