Facebook & My Primary School Buddies

Whenever I received a new friend request from Facebook, I accepted their request sometime without knowing them. Yesterday there was a Malay girl whose name was Atika Yusof. She wanted to link up with me on Facebook so I accepted her friend request. I also posted a comment on her wall and asked her if she knew me, she replied yes and tagged me on her primary 5 class photograph.

Atika Yusof asked me whether I could recognize her. Sadly I could not despite browsing through her photographs in her profile. However, I am still able to feel her presence, she looked familiar yet unfamiliar. Either my memory was not perfect or the photograph's resolution was too low. Anyway, she was my friend, getting connected up again is easy through social networks such as Facebook unlike in the past when mobile phones were still not invented.

In the middle of our conversation, I asked her where she worked and I was surprise to heard that she no longer can work given her current status. She wrote a long paragraph full of words and the only word that was captured by me as soon as the sentence appeared was "cancer". OMG, I said, what happened?

She told me that she had Leukemia cancer when she was primary 6. The last time I was same class as her was primary 5 so i did not know about her status until now. The treatment took her 4 years and now she recovered from that cancer. Luckily, she won the monster. Given her medical status, she was still able to study till O level and even ITE. That was really great for her. If it happens to me, I guess I should have quit school before O level. She was brave, strong and willing.

Leukemia cancer is extremely risky. It affects young children with a mortality rate as low as 20%. At the time of treatment, her cancer cells have not spread to any part of her organs or lymph nodes (stage 1 or 2 cancer) so she was considered not the worse case. She even has a brother who has a matching bone marrow stem cell as her but it was not required since she responded relatively well to chemotherapy. She told me that she nearly die. She was lucky. If no family member has a matching bone marrow stem cells as her, the probability of getting one matching donor from a stranger is 0.00005.