It was just over a month ago that a Ukrainian family got a troubling diagnosis about a life-threatening illness in their toddler. The next day, full-blown war arrived at their doorstep.
Dima Negodiuk told CBS News that his 2-year-old son Mark was diagnosed with cancer and had a massive brain tumor that needed to come out. The day after that diagnosis, Ukraine’s neighboring country Russia invaded and began bombing the Negodiuks’ hometown of Kyiv.
“Can you imagine?” Negodiuk said. “Two years old, he so small head and 8-centimeter tumor. So basically we understand that we only have each other in this life, so of course for our family the war was in the second place. The first place was to save, of course, our Mark.”
While Negodiuk’s little boy managed to undergo the life-saving surgery just days later, his recovery has been a rocky one with the family forced into their building’s basement as Russia continued to shell their city with bombs and missiles.
“Even to send biopsy to the Europe ... we ask some volunteers to cross the border and send it to Germany or Italy to understand if it's like bad tumor or good tumor,” Negodiuk said.
That was when 13-year-old Elana Koenig entered their lives.
A cancer survivor herself, Koenig founded the Koenig Childhood Cancer Foundation to help other sick children beat the deadly disease just as she did. She learned of the Negodiuk’s plight through social media.
“We started FaceTiming them,” Koenig told CBS News. “We saw their conditions. They were living in a basement. They weren't getting proper treatment, so we organized a flight over here so that they can actually get what they need.”
As an adult male under 60, Dima Negodiuk had to be granted a special exemption to leave his home country with his little boy, but he was allowed to accompany his son as they escaped the war-torn Ukraine capital city and fled to America and the KCCF’s homebase in New York City, where the organization has arranged for Mark to get necessary chemotherapy treatments.
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