Triston’s mum pushes on, hopes to hear from Children's Life Fund soon

Triston Ramlochan spent his 14th birthday with cake at the Eric Williams Medical Sciences Complex (EWMSC) hospital receiving treatment for his Acute Lymphoblastic Leukaemia. He celebrated his 14 th birthday on February 7.

Newsday highlighted Ramlochan’s story in January with his mother Natalie Joseph, appealing to the public for help, any help, financial or otherwise.

In an article in January, doctors at the North Central Regional Health Authority (NCRHA) said even after treatment that ended in 2020, Ramlochan’s leukaemia was still present and he would need immunotherapy followed by a stem-cell transplant or cellular therapy to survive. None of those are available in TT.

By now, Joseph had hoped she would have heard from the Children’s Life Fund and her son would have received the life-saving surgery that he needs.

But that has not been the case and the generous funds given to the family by the public have since dwindled.

The family’s FundMeTnT page raised $19,022 from a goal of over $1 million.

The fight to save Ramlochan’s life has left Joseph a broken woman.

Joseph is doing all she can to save her son’s life.

She said in a phone interview that funding has been slow.

“Right now, it has stopped completely and we still aren’t where we are supposed to be.”

Joseph used the donated funds to pay for a bone-marrow transplant test to ascertain whether or not his father, Ramdeo Ramlochan, could be a possible bone marrow donor.

The results showed that his father is a match. The test cost them $16,200.

He has also been accepted by the Indraprastha Apollo Hospital on January 22 in New Delhi, India. It is one of India’s largest health-care chains.

Joseph shared the latter with Newsday and it said that Ramlochan was accepted as a candidate for the bone-marrow transplant.

It added that he needed to come in for a detailed evaluation followed by blina therapy (a targeted type of cancer therapy) and then the bone-marrow transplant.

Joseph said she was last told by the Children’s Life Fund that he needed to do the bone marrow transplant test.

The family was then told that the fund would not be able to give any further information as to how things were coming along as it was a step-by-step process.

Joseph was told the fund would have to get back to them.

She added the doctors are now contemplating increasing Ramlochan's chemotherapy dose intensity.

The doctors had hoped he would have already got through with the Children’s Life Fund, she added.

When contacted yesterday, Children’s Life Fund CEO Corrine Brown said, “The authority treats all of its children with urgency. According to the act, one of the things that is critical to our funding, the children that come to us are life-threatening conditions that cannot be treated in TT.”

Brown said Ramlochan is no different and the fund has been working through the application process to get to a point where they could give funding.

Brown said updates were only given to the parents as those were confidential.

Joseph said, if the transplant was not done, she believed her son would not to survive.

“He needs to go across to Apollo to do that,” she added, tears swelling her voice.

Asked how she has been coping, Joseph said, beginning to cry, “It has been a struggle because every day I am getting up and I am seeing my child going through all of this pain and I can’t do anything to help him.

“To know it has a life-saving surgery to save his life and because of the funding and because of us waiting on the Children’s Life Fund, it has me real broken.

“I am broken,” she said.

Joseph is asking for the public’s kind help again by donating to Ramlochan’s FundMeTnT page at https://fundmetnt.com/campaign/help-triston-caleb-ramlochan-fight-against-leukaemia