11 year-old Mariam Sahakyan rarely attends school. The young girl suffers from cystic fibrosis.

Physicians have advised the family to provide Mariam with good nutrition and normal living conditions.

The girl is forced to sleep in a half-sitting position since her phlegm is quite viscous and she has trouble breathing otherwise.

To make matters worse, Mariam is also epileptic.

Getting proper drugs is a challenge for Mariam and the other 33 children afflicted with cystic fibrosis in Armenia.

Even though the government must provide proper medication, oftentimes clinics refuse to give patients the necessary drugs, arguing that the Ministry of Health doesn’t provide adequate financing for them to purchase the expensive drugs and offer them free of charge to patients like Mariam.

Once a month, Polyclinic 14 in Nor Nork provides Mariam with only a portion of the drugs she has been prescribed. The clinic says it isn’t being adequately financed for the rest.

Zara Sahakyan, the girl’s mother, told me that Mariam gets upset when her parents have to scrimp and save and borrow the money for her drugs.

Mrs. Sahakyan says that Mariam needs to take Pariet (Rabeprazole sodium), a drug used for the treatment of stomach ulcers and chronic gastritis. She says the drug costs about 17,000 AMD.

Other drugs that Mariam needs to take when her illness gets worse include Fromilid, Sinupret and Fenistil. Mrs. Sahakyan says that she is often forced to purchase just a tablet or two of each given the prohibitive cost.

Artem Sahakyan, Mariam’s father, is the only one working in the family. He’s a day laborer in the construction business. The girl’s grandmother sells her handicrafts at the Vernisage market.

Mariam will be receiving a disability pension of 18,000 AMD ($50) as of this month. It won’t even cover the cost of her medications.

Zara Sahakyan has been bed-ridden for the past 3 years. She can hardly walk from one room to the next.

She says that she suffers from polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS), one of the most common female endocrine disorders.

After being operated on at the hospital in Abovyan, Zara began to experience severe spinal pain.

An examination at the Yerevan Republican Hospital diagnosed a spinal non-alignment issue and prescribed a round of various treatments. Zara could only afford a portion of the treatment.

Zara has not been certified as a person with a disability. She says that she somehow made it to the Nor Nork #14 Polyclinic and was told to wait for three months for a response. The three months were up in December and Zara hasn’t heard anything yet.

It remains for Grandma Julieta to somehow take care of Zara, her daughter-in-law, and her granddaughter Mariam, while her son Artem is out working at various construction jobs.