The Charity and Mutual Aid Foundation “Ana” takes intensive care of Alexandra Vlad’ s case
A little girl for which walking is a dream

I look at her closely and from a distance! She amazes me! Her bright eyes, but a little discouraged....you just look at her and she amazes you.
She is 13 years old and everybody knows Alexandra Vlad from Prundu Bârgăului as being a gentle, educated, manerred child, who won many prizes at school, but who must struggle with a disease that doesn’t allow her to stand.
I looked at the one that gave birth to her, at her mother, and I asked her at a glance: “what happened?”
With a slight melancholy in her voice she started to tell me about how “her little girl, when she was 9 and a half, started to feel pain in her arms and that from one point forward she could walk just on her fingertips and that she couldn’t keep her balance, and if she sat too much she could no longer stand up, she could just climb”. She came home from school and said: <<mom, I couldn’t do the dwarfish walk during the Sports class>>”.
She breathes and then she sighs.
And then she keeps telling, still, about her little girl, with pride in her voice: “I took her to Cluj, to Târgu Mureş and finally to Bucharest. They put her the diagnosis of dystrophy, but none of them knew what kind of distrophy it was. Still, doctor Brunei concluded that it was a muscular distrophy.”
And....they all looked upon her case with very much attention. Then, a hope appeared, hope that still exists in the souls of the mother and daughter: the Charity and Mutual Aid Foundation “Ana” from Suceava, through the vicepresident of the Baia-Mare branch and the coordinator of the Bistriţa branch, Hermina Băbaş, started to take care of Alexandra Vlad’s case. In this context, doctor Brunei found a solution- the laser surgery. In November 2006 Alexandra’s life started to change.
I look at her closely.
The rumpled brown hair and the dark brown eyes “tell” me that she has a “best friend, Helen, older than me”. She likes playing on the computer, listening to music, reading, but mostly studying English.
And I look at her from a distance...and there I see her mother, this time having a deep, but trustful look. “They told me that they found a dark spot on her pelvis, that being the cause for her not being able to walk. I still made everything I could and took her to surgery, where I was also encouraged by the Charity and Mutual Aid Foundation “Ana”, which became like a family to me and my little girls, because her father, who went to Italy, didn’t help us at all. He said that he also had to live, that his life there is hard too, but what about his child?! Doesn’t she have to eat too and have an easier life? Anyway.... I managed to raise the money and I accepted to do the surgery. It all cost around 50 millions lei”.
They went through a lot of emotions, but what doesn’t a mother do for her child?...
She now has to go through a recovery process (at Vâlcele, at Techirghiol). Once in 2 weeks she has to go to gym in Bucharest. She needs a corset, a prothesis, boots (which will be given to her by the Health Insurance County Department). Now, this latter waiting is harder than the former one. The word “recovery” seems to be...something else.
I dare to look at her once again, and she...smiles at me!
It is impressive how a 13 year old child has to look upon things more maturely than the ones having the same age as she her’s. But she keeps on struggling, and even if now she can’t lift her arms higher than the elbow and seems to have lost a “battle”, the keys of the “war” and the secrets of recovery lay in her ambition and in the mastery of the specialists.