Dear friends,

As nothing can stop the sand in the hour glass to go to the bottom half of it, so my sickness nothing, except the surgery, can stop from winning over me. My name is Dejana Lekic. My normal life was interrupted in the very beginning, 16 years ago, when I got a severe form of Crohn's disease, inflammation of intestines with cause unknown. Since then, some would say by the struck of faith, because my sickness was not understood and severity of it was underestimated I had to undergo surgeries 20 times. Each surgery had to remove a little bit of the intestines and now I have just 50 centimetres of small intestines. Everything else, small intestines, large intestines, gallbladder. had to be removed. That is how I became the only patient of this kind in Yugoslavia.

The only way to survive is to use special intravenous nutrients (TPN), which I get through special catheter and the vein, lying in bed up to twelve hours a day. Unfortunatly, this type of surviving has its time limits.

The only way for me to survive is the surgery, i. e. intestine transplant. The hope that I can survive and make my life longer the doctors from Thomas E. Starzl - Transplantation Institute, University of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA, gave me.

My life is slowly getting through my fingers, and no matter how hard I want, try and fight, I can't help myself because I can't pay for the surgery. Please, help me to become the first girl from Serbia that would undergo this kind of surgery. Help me, please, because I would like to live.

Dejana Lekic,
dejanalekic@besplatne-stvari.com
dejanalekic@pochtamt.ru

For more information call secretary of Dr Kareem Abu-Elmagd, the Director of the Intestinal Transplant Program from University of Pittsburgh, who came to see Dejana here in Belgrade and determined the transplatation as her only chance to survive. Telephone number of secretary Colangelo Joanne: 1-877-640-8941 Email: colangelojc@msx.upmc.edu