Help Yulia survive war and beat cancer

Yulia is one of the most generous, sincere, and caring people I know. Like all of us, she’s had a hard couple of years, and as 2022 was rolling in, like most of us, she was hoping to catch a break, to travel again, to meet friends, to feel normal. On December 31, I called to toast the new year and fantasize about getting together soon, but found her crushed. Yulia just learned that she had Stage 2 breast cancer, which spread far and wide to make immediate surgery unsafe and chemotherapy a gamble.

Yulia has been my best friend since elementary school. As the Soviet Union came crashing down around us and most people had to compromise their ethics and values just to survive, Yulia did not. She has been caring for her ailing mother since college, and she always found the awe-inspiring strength to carry on. Today, she is bracing to fight cancer in a country where there is no health insurance, and your healthcare stops when your savings run out, in a country where for many winters now people are terrorized by energy outages, suffer no heat, no hot water, in a country on the brink of becoming another acceptable collateral damage of Russia’s endless aggression. On the day when Yulia found that her savings would run out after the first round of chemo, she also found a freshly-posted state notice on the door of her Kyiv apartment building, where she lived all 43 years of her life - "Basement is your nearest bomb shelter."

 

I am starting this fundraiser to give my best friend a fighting chance to beat cancer before a war breaks out in Ukraine and hers becomes just one of thousands of lives lost.