Avraham Anidjar
Life Raft member Avraham Anidjar of Los Angeles died April 17 after a seven-year battle with GIST. He was 51, and leaves his wife, Sara, and four children. This was the message she sent to the Life Raft. “Today I lost my dearest husband, Avraham Anidjar, who fought GIST for seven years. He died on his 51st birthday. The irony is that my husband died not from GIST but from inexperienced doctors, young and ignorant, who never saw a GIST patient in their lives. “It was a weekend, his doctor was in New York and we fell into a deep dark hole. “Seven years ago, in Israel, my husband was diagnosed with sarcoma. The doctors were very pessimistic and did not give us any hope or chance of survival (the tumor was huge). “My husband was a prominent lawyer and I was teaching math and biology in high school and university. We, with our four small children — boys age 4 and 5, and girls age 9 and 11 — came to the United States. We came full of hope, determined to defeat the illness with a sum of a quarter- million dollars. “My husband was operated on successfully. A year later, the cancer metastasized to the liver. At the end of 2002 we discovered Gleevec. The Gleevec never caused any shrinkage but the mets were stable. “The last months we were fighting low blood pressure and low hemoglobin. My husband was not ready to die and we were not ready to let him go. We were optimistic and had many plans for the future that, unfortunately, will be without him. “This coming Hanukkah my son will celebrate his bar mitzvah (a Jewish celebration of a boy coming of age at 13) alone. “My friends, light a candle for us — a candle of protest, of despair, of shock, of hope that never will be fulfilled.
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