Cancer patient’s expensive drug fight
The cost of cancer treatment has forced a Golden Bay couple to crowdfund for a drug that is available to breast cancer patients for free.
Babs Roberts-Borchers, 54, was diagnosed with esophageal cancer at the end of March, after having trouble swallowing for several months.
An endoscopy revealed stage four cancer, which was inoperable and had spread through her lymph nodes to her liver.
Her oncologist told her she was in the 6 per cent of the population with esophageal cancer who would respond to the cancer drug Herceptin. But there was a costly catch.
Herceptin is funded for breast cancer patients only, leaving Roberts-Borchers with a $42,000 annual bill to pay for the drug, which could extend her life by several years.
She was told she had only three months to live if her cancer was left untreated.
Roberts-Borchers has had chemotherapy to shrink the liver tumours, but ‘‘it’s a question of hitting it really hard with the Herceptin, so that hopefully I can live a few more years, not just months’’, she said.
On top of the annual drug costs, another $1200 every three weeks is required to pay for the private hospital visit at Nelson’s Manuka Street Hospital to administer Herceptin.
Crippled by the courses of cancer treatment, Roberts-Borchers is no longer working, and her husband, Mark Roberts, has also given up work due to the stress of seeing his wife go through the illness.
Roberts said the system was ‘‘unfair’’, forcing his wife to be treated at the private hospital by their oncologist, which they had to pay for, when they already had to fork out for the drugs.
‘‘Ideally, she should be given Herceptin at the same time she’s given her chemotherapy drugs.
‘‘Every which way you turn, you’re kind of caught, and this is for a drug where women who have breast cancer are given it fully funded as long as they need it.’’
The couple have managed to raise more than half the annual cost of the drug through the crowdfunding site GoFundMe. But despite being short of the target, RobertsBorchers is starting Herceptin treatment this month.
Pharmac director of operations Lisa Williams said the company’s current budget for medicines was $995 million. The government drugbuying agency’s role was to decide which medicines were funded within that fixed budget, ‘‘and we
know that the decisions we make impact nearly every New Zealander’’.
She said that while Pharmac only funded Herceptin for the treatment of certain breast cancers, ‘‘it is important to remember that medicines are just one tool for treating cancer. The majority of cancers are controlled using surgery and radiotherapy’’.
In New Zealand, Herceptin is only marketed for the treatment of early breast cancer and advanced gastric cancer, but in Britain it is also used to treat esophageal cancer through the National Health Service.
Originally from Germany, and married to a British citizen, Roberts-Borchers would be eligible for the treatment in the United Kingdom. ‘‘I could make the choice to move to England, but my heart and my life is in New Zealand,’’ she said.
She said she had lived her for nearly 14 years, and didn’t want to go back to ‘‘tap into the English health system just for the sake of it’’.
‘‘It’s a case of really fighting for justice here, because I cannot be the only person – there must be other people in my position.’’
Nelson Cancer Society manager Michelle Hunt said she knew of about six people in the region fundraising for drug treatments that were not covered by Pharmac. ‘‘It is quite common.’’
‘‘It’s a case of really fighting for justice.’’ Babs Roberts-Borchers