Can you spare a dime?
Cancer sucks. NET cancer, in particular, sucks.
It isn’t just that we have no reliable way to detect NET cancer early. It is not just that we have no cure for the advanced stage the disease is at when we finally diagnose it correctly. And it is not the physical awfulness of the end of a NET cancer patient’s life. It is the begging for money our healthcare system requires of patients and their families.
In the richest country in the world, that’s just wrong.
One of the people I follow on Twitter is a young woman with two children and pancreatic cancer. There is apparently a treatment available at MD Anderson in Texas she would like to try. But she has to get there, stay there for an extended period and, likely, will have to pay for the treatments out of her own pocket if they are considered experimental by her health insurance provider.
The moral price of treatment
Too many Americans face this kind of trouble getting treatment for their cancers. Several times a year I walk into a store and see a jar with someone’s picture on it and a wrenching story about raising money for some form of cancer treatment that is not available locally. Several times a month online I see pleas from NET cancer patients who need to go to Europe for PRRT treatments they hope will buy them a few more years with lessened symptoms.
…most people in the US are not so fortunate.
Lately, I’ve begun to see similar requests from people involved in the American trials of that radiation therapy for NET cancer.
NET cancer patient and full-time fundraiser?
I work at fundraising several hours every day and I know how tiring and frustrating it is. But I am physically healthy. I cannot imagine doing what I do every day if I had cancer and had to raise the money to pay for treatments in addition to taking care of kids and working–or had to function as a caregiver as well. I cannot imagine having my life depend on whether or not I could raise $20,000 this month and another $20,000 next month and another $20,000 the month after that.
Her monthly Sandostatin injection was nearly $10,000.
Those are the goals we face every month if Walking with Jane is to meet its fundraising goals for the year, but if we fall short, we are not going to have to pass on a treatment that could mean another year or more of quality life.
NET cancer treatment costs
Cancer–particularly the ones we do not know how to cure–too often reduces patients and their families to beggary. A one month supply of Jane’s daily Octreotide was $58,000. Her monthly Sandostatin injection was nearly $10,000. At one point when she was in the hospital we were running a month’s worth of Octreotide into her every 12 hours. Following her heart surgery, she was in an intensive cardiac care ward for 28 days at one of America’s best hospitals.
Too many Americans face this kind of trouble…
We were lucky. We had good insurance and good state statutes so that virtually everything was covered. And we had cutting edge medical facilities within easy driving distance. But most people in the US are not so fortunate. They would have dealt with financial bankruptcy hard on the heels of their grief.
This is just wrong
In the richest country in the world, that’s just wrong. No one who fights cancer should have to spend a second worrying about where the money for treatment is coming from.
It is the begging for money our healthcare system requires…
What we have now is better than what came before it–but it is not enough–not when a woman with two kids and pancreatic cancer needs to raise the money for her own treatment.
(If you’d like to help Penny Adams-Jackson, the woman I mentioned in this piece, here is the information for the fund that has been set up for her: Penny Adams-Jackson Medical Fund, Farmers & Merchants Bank. 1315 West Market St. Bolivar, TN 38008.)
