These are external links and will open in a new window. Fifteen years ago there was no such thing as palliative care - care for the dying - in Mongolia. Now there is, thanks to the efforts of one woman, who persuaded the country's medical establishment that it was possible and worthwhile to prevent people dying in agony. Odontuya Davaasuren was 17 years old, studying paediatrics far from home in Leningrad, Russia when her father died of lung cancer in Mongolia. Several years later, as a practising doctor, she shared her apartment with her mother-in-law, who was dying of liver cancer, and she saw first-hand how pain could deprive people of peace at the end their life.
I fed, washed and changed her, but I could not relieve her pain because I didn't know how," she says. The only medication available for dying patients in Mongolia at the time was what you'd get for muscle pain or headaches, not the persistent pain of a tumour pressing on nerves in the upper abdomen. Nor the multiple other symptoms like constant nausea and vomiting. If these experiences weren't enough, at work Davaasuren witnessed children with leukaemia so wracked with pain they never smiled or spoke, and a young mother who cried constantly and asked to be killed to escape the pain of stomach cancer.
But that was just false hope. The idea of palliative or end-of-life care, to support people in the last months or years of their life, was well established in other countries. But in Mongolia, home of the conqueror Genghis Khan, where nomads have lived and died by the harsh conditions of the landscape for millennia, it was entirely unknown.
Then a trip to Sweden in , to attend a European Palliative Care Association conference, opened Davaasuren's eyes and eventually helped her make Mongolia a better place to die. A wind cold enough to freeze your fingers within seconds is blowing across low brown hills that ripple across the landscape on the outskirts of Ulan Bator, the Mongolian capital. Not a single building, streetlight or electrical pylon is visible, just a scattering of round tents, called gers , the traditional home of nomadic farmers.
Entering through the sky blue wooden door of one ger, Davaasuren, now 59 and a grandmother, meets Timurbat. He sits propped on a wooden bed, against turquoise fabric printed with large, red roses that lines the inside of the dwelling.
