PUNJAB: Four years back, Jasjeet Singh Sohal’s family went through the worst of their life; they lost their young daughter to blood cancer. The tragedy stirred a quiet transformation in Sohal as he went out with like-minded people to help those suffering from cancer and kidney failure. They bought medicines for them, paid for their surgery costs and test bills, organised blood donation camps and fed afflicted children every Sunday.
Over the years they have conducted eight donor drives in which around 1,700 volunteers have registered as stem cell donors. Sohal’s objective is to maximize registrations for stem cell donors across India. In 2017, Sohal floated Ishnoor Charitable Society in the name of his deceased daughter, Ishnoor Kaur (19). His eyes welled up when he recalled the day she got admission in Amritsar Medical College — on August 26, 2016. When they returned to Kharar from Amritsar the same evening, she had a high fever.
“We gave her medicine and the fever came down but again in the morning, she had high fever,” says Sohal. “Her TLC count was very high and blood count very less. “After more advanced tests, she was diagnosed with blood cancer.” PGI Chandigarh doctors examined her further and found that her condition was not good.
On September 5, 2016, she was supposed to join her college, but she was instead admitted to PGI for chemotherapy. “We started looking for donors for her bone marrow transplant as a 100% match was required, but could not find anyone in India. On December 30, the doctors went ahead with the bone marrow transplant and on January 16, 2017, she was discharged from the hospital and told to come for regular check-ups,” recalls Sohal. On March 22 again, she was diagnosed with fungal infection. In May that year we got a shock that her transplant had failed as doctors had given her very heavy anti-fungal injections for almost 25 days,” he says.
After an international search, a 100 per cent match was found in Israel and her second bone marrow transplant was scheduled for July 23, 2017. But she died on July 22. Sohal couldn’t save his daughter but is determined to save as many other patients as possible. His society has helped around 1,200 persons. Of them, 50 per cent are children. Among them are six-month-old Abhi and 25-year-old Swati.
Sohal says his family went to the Hans Raj Dharamsala in PGI where there were children with chronic diseases. They adopted four of them, but later thought that this was not the solution and that all of them should be helped. Since then, he along with his wife and friends started visiting the dharamsala every Sunday, where they cooked food of the inmates’ choice because some patients had lost taste due to prolonged medication.
“We started out by paying for medicines of chronic patients, mainly children whose families had no money to buy the expensive medicines. As the word spread, more and more patients came in. In many cases, we pay a part of the treatment after checking the credentials of the patient. We also pay for some of the tests of the patients. Every day we get at least one new patient,” he says.