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Carole Mikita ReportingImagine you're a 12-year-old receiving the news from a doctor that you have cancer, and being told you'll just have to go home and die. That happened to a girl in Mongolia recently, but thanks to several Utah doctors, her prognosis is now good.
A Utah doctor, Gary Gibbons, was serving a mission for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Mongolia when a government minister approached him about a girl who had thyroid cancer.
Amarzaya Boldbaatar is taking a walk that will save her life. In late January, she traveled from Outer Mongolia to Northern Utah for a seven-hour surgery to remove her cancerous thyroid.
Dr. Gibbons: "They removed the cancer of her neck, which was fairly extensive. They even had to take the internal jugular vein and her total thyroidectomy, I mean, they removed her entire thyroid."
She has recovered well from that. The next step is a radioactive pill.
Leland Rogers, M.D., Radiation Oncologist: "You literally take a pill, and the iodine is accumulated in the thyroid gland and gives an immense dose of radiation and has a very high cure rate."
Dr. Gary Gibbons, former LDS mission president in Mongolia, contacted Dr. Rogers of Gamma West Brachytherapy and doctors Jeffrey Bennion and Jim Blotter in Logan, who all donated their time and services, as did the hospitals.
Gary Gibbons, M.D., LDS Mission President, Mongolia: "In charitable service now, would cost in Mongolia about forty years of full-time labor by her father, he makes less than a thousand dollars a year."
Mother and daughter will spend six weeks in Utah before returning home to Mongolia.
Dr. Rogers: "She's a wonderful, very fun little girl. There's an excellent chance she'll have a full life with this treatment."
That radioactive pill that Amarzaya swallowed is a one-time treatment; she will not need anymore radiation.
