As Aracilis Castillio watched her son gasping for air, she steeled herself for what was to come.
She hoped what was troubling her boy, 10-year-old Luis Yireh Cancel-Castillo, was something simple like fatigue. But when she and her husband, Luis Cancel, rushed him to a nearby hospital, they had resigned themselves to a different kind of struggle. The family moved from Puerto Rico to York five years ago. English is still challenging ― especially when it comes to talking with people in white coats, who seem to communicate in a third language of medical and scientific terms.
What came next for the family was far worse than anything they could have imagined. An X-ray revealed a dark spot in Luis’s chest. It turned out to be a large mass called T-lymphoblastic lymphoma. It had spread to his kidneys.
Luis was taken to Penn State Health Children’s Hospital, and then came two miracles. One has happened for nearly 5,000 families since 1972 ― a charity called Four Diamonds offered to pay any costs of his cancer care not covered by insurance.
The second was meeting Ernesto Garcia.
Source: The voice: Four Diamonds-funded translator helps families struck by childhood cancer
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