It had scam scrawled all over it. The mother of a sick kid in Ukraine is pleading for money? Please.
And then Janet Adelfio invited me inside.
The breakfast bar off the kitchen of her home in Henderson was strewn with papers and documents — Ukrainian ID cards, government letters and the like, all evidence of her work every day since November.
Janet Adelfio is 52 years old and spends the bulk of her days alone on the family room sofa with her three dogs. Until early last year, she had been a nurse at Denver Health.
On April 4, 2008, doctors made the diagnosis — cystic fibrosis — she had feared for 10 years. She knew it wasn’t asthma or even Gulf War syndrome, as friends and some doctors had pegged it. She had served 17 years as a nurse in the military, finally retiring a major in the Army. She knew what it was.
Still, the diagnosis floored her.
“You have to do all these crazy, stupid treatments — the breathing,” she said, weeping. “You have no idea of how sick I have been.”
Completely despondent one night, she did an Internet search on cystic fibrosis. She came across a plea from a mother in Ukraine.
Her 15-year-old daughter, she wrote, was diagnosed with cystic fibrosis at age 6 and is dying because of a lack of proper medical care.
“My baby is a kind and generous girl,” the woman wrote.
Janet Adelfio immediately wrote back. What do you need? she asked.
She and the woman exchanged e-mails, which now number in the dozens. She has sent books, and breathing aids for the daughter. And then, she made countless calls.
It would be easier to list the doctors, aid workers and others in Ukraine she did not contact. The letters and other information she received back all spoke of the lack of medical care available to the girl, how it would be good, if not miraculous, if she could somehow find her help.
She joined a Ukrainian cultural group in Denver to recruit help — or just a sympathetic ear. That led to other contacts in Kiev, people willing to get the mother and daughter a passport.
She contacted hospitals here. The cost of treating the girl, she was told, would be anywhere from $96,000 to $180,000 as an inpatient, $3,600 to $16,000 on an outpatient basis.
Of course, all of it, she was told, is payable upfront.
That would be enough for me and, I figure, most people to slam on the goodwill breaks. Janet Adelfio last week set up an account at all TCF banks to take in donations.
If Jessica and Matt, two Americans in Ukraine she has enlisted to help get the passports, come through, she will pay the $600 “humanitarian parole fees” to get the mother and daughter out of the country.
She has lined up a $5,000 grant from a cystic fibrosis organization and is tossing in the $2,000 she won in a settlement. She will also pay to fly them here and will, she says, put them up in her home.
“I know in my heart,” a weeping Adelfio said, “when something is right. I know how I felt deep in my gut how I felt when I heard my diagnosis.
“You do things when you can. It was how I was brought up. I have lived my whole life. Now, it is (the daughter’s) turn.”
Bill Johnson writes Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Reach him at 303-954-2763 or wjohnson@denverpost.com.
