Young survivor of thyroid cancer faces the future with courage (01/07/96)

Young survivor of thyroid cancer faces the future with courage

by Alex Kuzma

KYIV - Anya Mospan lives on the northwest outskirts of Kyiv, more than a dozen bus stops beyond the Nyvky Metro station, in the Sviatoshyno District. If it weren't for her grandmother, Serafima Ivanivna Parkhomenko, who showed me the way, I doubt that I ever would have found the place.

The Mospans' apartment is located on a dimly lit backstreet named after Vasyl Poryk - one of the 34 nuclear clean-up workers who died in the first days following the fire and explosion at Chornobyl. Anya is herself a living symbol of Chornobyl's hidden legacy - one of the 288 children and teenagers who have undergone treatment for thyroid cancer in the past few years at Kyiv's Institute of Endocrinology.

Prior to Chornobyl, thyroid cancer among children in Ukraine was extremely rare, numbering only one or two cases per year. Since 1989, thyroid cancer incidence has risen sharply; in 1992, the World Health Organization reported that the rate among children and adolescents had reached levels 80 times higher than normal.

In November of 1995, at the same time I was visiting the Mospan family, 600 health experts from around the world gathered in Geneva to determine the cause of this soaring cancer rate in Ukraine and Belarus. In a unanimous decision, they concluded that the increase was definitely related to Chornobyl and the massive exposure of children to radioactive iodine in the spring of 1986.

While scientists and researchers strive to calculate the toll that Chornobyl has taken on affected populations, the individual victims and survivors of the tragedy often get lost in a faceless numbers game. Personal experiences become obscured by the all-consuming drive to get at the raw data underlying years of government cover-ups and bureaucratic obstacles. To this day, many scientists funded by the nuclear industry are spending more energy on denying the disaster's impact than actually examining its victims.

Anya defies the stereotype of a nuclear victim. During our meeting at her home, she laughs and teases her family about their doting concern for her well-being. She enjoys reminiscing about a recent trip to Sweden, where she and other Ukrainian teenagers recuperating from thyroid surgery were hosted by a Scandinavian charity group.

The only visible sign of Anya's bout with cancer is a long scar along her neck line, but originally, she keeps it hidden under a turtleneck sweater.

Anya was first diagnosed with a malignant tumor when she was 14 - that awkward age when girls become increasingly self-conscious about their appearance and their attractiveness to boys. By all accounts, Anya was handling the transition well. She was popular with her classmates and gifted student, earning nearly straight A's ("5's). She had a special interest in music, a sweet, lyrical soprano, and was considering a career as an opera singer. Her mother - a professional photographer - keeps a picture to remind herself of how Anya looked before her operation.

Now that her thyroid gland and a portion of her larynx have been removed, Anya's appearance has changed considerably. Her girlish figure has filled out after months of harmone treatments. Her voice, whose clarity once delighted her family and music teachers, has become wheezy and constricted. Her breathing is often labored, as if she had been smoking cigarettes for many years.

Anya was recently interviewed by a television news crew from the United States in preparation for a special report on the 10th anniversary of Chornobyl to be broadcast next spring. The audio engineer and the interviewer seemed exasperated by the weakness of her voice. Soft-spoken, nervous and tongue-tied, Anya could not provide the sort of dramatic footage the news team was looking for.

As one Belarusian essayist phrased it, Chornobyl is not a "made for TV" disaster. It does not provide Western journalists with fields strewn with bodies, and it frustrates those who seek convenient images to capture the full scope and horror of massive radiation exposure.

Yet there are hundreds of children like Anya scattered across Ukraine and Belarus and the Briansk region of southwestern Russia. Thousands more are suffering from other radiation-related ailments, birth defects and immune deficiencies. Not all of them are coping as well as Anya with the damage their illness has inflicted on their appearance, their self-esteem and their future.

One of Anya's classmates who also survived thyroid cancer twice attempted suicide in despair over the unsightly scars her surgery had left on her.

There is no question in the minds of Serafima Ivanivna and her family that Anya's condition was caused by Chornobyl. They remember how innocently it all began - on a beautiful spring day in April of 1986.

The Mospans were planting a vegetable garden at their "dacha" - a tiny cottage on the shore of Holube Ozero (Blue Lake) in the village of Verkovtsi. Anya was 6 years old then, playing in the sand, oblivious to the danger drifting south towards Kyiv on what seemed like a gentle breeze.

The danger was compounded a few days later, when Anya joined thousands of schoolchildren marching in the May Day Parade in Kyiv, as radioactive iodine reached levels more than 100 times higher than normal. It was that iodine, scientists are convinced, which is causing the sharp and continuous increase in thyroid cancers five to 10 years later.

Despite her ordeal, Anya is determined to become more than just another statistic. Now that her hopes for a singing career have been so rudely dashed, Anya tells me she would like to study law and become an attorney.

At first, she strike me as too frail and too soft-spoken for the rigors of the courtroom, but the more I think of it, the more her career choice seems appropriate. There is a quiet intensity about this young woman.

Anya Mospan may someday take on the kinds of injustices she has been subjected to. As an advocate for the defenseless and the downtrodden, she could bring some genuine inspiration to her jaded peers.

Anya Mospan was one of the beneficiaries of a large shipment of thyroxin and other cancer medication delivered to the Kyiv Institute of Endocrinology by the Children of Chornobyl Foundation of Short Hills, N.J.

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