THE ON-going signature campaign towards making dialysis, the life-saving medical procedure that has to be sustained for a life-time, was triggered by the recent decision of an ailing housewife to stop her treatment and save her family from further financial and distress.

Launched by journalists under the Baguio Correspondents and Broadcasters Club, the signature campaign kicked off January 17 was pushed by that decision of Jane Lamlamag Garcia, 34, to stop her twice-a-week hemodialysis for kidney failure so her family could focus on the treatment of her two minor children.

“Imbagana nga nabannog kano unayen ket kayat na nga agiginana isua nga kapilitan nga inyawid mi isuna idiay Mankayan idi Disyembre (She said she was already too tired and wanted to rest so we brought her home to Mankayan),” her husband Romeo, a miner in Lepanto Mines, said.

Jane, a native of Bauko, Mt. Province, left two young daughters also afflicted with serious illnesses– Princess Arcia, 6, who is battling leukemia or cancer of the blood, and Cathy Sy, 4, who was diagnosed for epilepsy.

After burying his wife in Bauko, Romeo was himself confined for a week at the Notre Dame de Lourdes Hospital here in Baguio. That’s when he was told his own kidneys were also on the early stages of malfunction, he said after his release the other week, when he visited Princess, who was confined at the Baguio General Hospital and Medical Center.

Cash-strapped, Romeo was only too glad when told support of P10,000 was sent by former world karate champion Julian Chees from the martial artist’s headquarters in Germany.

Chees, a former member of the German national karate team, sent the amount when he learned of Garcia’s predicament in the wake of his wife’s death.

It was the latest support to indigent patients here sent by Chees, a native of Maligcong, Bontoc, Mt. Province who trained under the late Shihan Kunio Sasaki and Edgar Kapawen of the Japan Karate Association based at the YMCA of Baguio.

“I’ve had a difficult boyhood because of poverty, and that experience propelled me to establish a small foundation here in Germany to be able to reach to those in need back home,” Chees said.

His association was also recently in mourning over the death of Katharina Schwarz Ehemann, mother of Renate Doth, secretary of the Shoshin Kinderhilfe-Julian Chees Foundation which oversees the humanitarian outreach here. (Ramon Dacawi)