Woman faces $110,000 a month bill

‘‘Pay up or die’’ is the choice for a woman in her 30s trying to raise about $110,000 amonth for lifeextending breast cancer treatment.

Hollie Mcintyre, 31, has become an unwitting spokeswoman for ‘‘unlucky’’ cancer patients who are unsuccessful with funded treatment, and she is calling for more money for treatments funded in countries like Australia.

The resident of Northland’s One Tree Point first noticed a lump in her breast in early 2019. But when she went to Whanga¯rei’s specialist breast clinic, she was told the lump was just a benign cyst that would eventually go away.

It wasn’t until October 2019, when Mcintyre was rushed to hospital with severe symptoms, that she was diagnosed with breast cancer.

But Mcintyre said that was not the end of her bad luck: Her cancer turned out to be a rare and aggressive form, called triplenegative metastatic breast cancer, and it had spread through her bloodstream to other parts of her body, including her liver, spine and an ovary.

She immediately began a cycle of chemotherapy, which meant she had to quit her job as a pharmacy retail manager, and her partner Andrew Welsh had to reduce his hours as a scrap metal recycler to drive her to treatments in Auckland.

That was when a relative first started a Givealittle page for

Mcintyre, and members of the Bream Bay community stepped in with fundraisers.

Mcintyre was first treated with funded chemotherapies Paclitaxel Ebewe (paclitaxel), then doxorubicin but these could not halt the cancer spreading.

The treatment took a toll on her health and, after an amazing weekend where she proposed to her partner at Auckland’s Ellerslie Racecourse on Leap Day, Mcintyre ended up in hospital with sepsis.

She recovered and spent level 4 lockdown at home but coronavirus was top of mind when she had to go back to Auckland for radiation treatment, which she did while taking chemotherapy Brinov (capecitabine).

Finally, a specialist oncologist recommended she tried the unfunded chemotherapy Halaven