A Vietnamese student has tried to continue his education and successfully stepped into college, despite the cancer that has been with him for several years.

Tran Cong Huan, from Quang Tri Province, has been admitted to Thai Binh University in the northern province of Thai Binh as an information technology major after living with uncertainty about his cancer-related death over the past five years.

Huan has been visibly thinner since he was first diagnosed with leukemia, a disease with a high number of abnormal white blood cells.

He recalled that when he was first taken to hospital after falling unconscious during a class session, a doctor who took his blood sample found that the boy’s blood coagulated as soon as it came into the syringe.

The eighth grader had to stay in the hospital for urgent medical treatment with potent medication, and left all schoolwork behind.

“I was sad because I knew that people with cancer don’t know when they’ll die,” Huan recalled.

“But I was much sadder because I couldn’t go to school.”

After four months, he was discharged with a course of daily medicine and at the beginning of a new academic year, and asked for his mother’s permission to study in grade eight again – an idea that she approved of.

In grade 11, Tuan once again fainted due to the condition so he was hospitalized and strived to attend school two weeks after the episode.

Now as a college student, he has not wavered in his determination to learn more.

“I’ll still study until I stop breathing,” he said.

Tuan’s parents have been in great debt because the mother as a self-employed sewer and the father, a construction worker, failed to cover their son’s medical costs during the past five years.

The parents decided to support Tuan through college, although filled with financial worries.

“I’ll try to give him a chance to go to school. The most fearful thing is that he loses confidence. I always hope he’ll realize his ambition,” said Nguyen Thi Kim Yen, Tuan’s mother, referring to the student’s dream of designing computer software.

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