Baby brightens sad time
The birth of her niece’s baby boy on New Year’s Eve brought joy to Mareta Marsters-Grubner after a sad Christmas coming to terms with the fact she might not be around to see him grow up.
‘‘After a hellish year last year, that topped it off beautifully, so I was really happy,’’ the South Taranaki woman said.
Marsters-Grubner is one of 30,000 people who signed a petition in October asking the government drug funding agency Pharmac to fund two new drugs for women with metastatic breast cancer. Just before Christmas Pharmac announced its Cancer Treatments Subcommittee had recommended funding one of the drugs for new patients but not for women who had already undergone other hormone treatments, like Marsters-Grubner. "When I first read it I was devastated, then I was mad. I thought of all the women who have fought for this, none of us will get it, none of us,’’ she said.
‘‘I’m happy for the women of the future who are diagnosed with it, it will be a front-line treatment.’’
In May last year she found out that the breast cancer she was treated for a decade ago had returned and spread to her lungs, spine, bones and lymph nodes, and partially collapsed one of her lungs.
Without Pharmac funding, treatment with Ibrance, the drug that could help Marsters Grubner, costs $6000 a month. It is money she doesn’t have.
In February she will travel to Wellington to make a submission to the Health Select Committee seeking to have the drug made available to women like her.
‘‘There’s quite a few of us that are going to make another submission, we’re not going to lie down, we want this for all of us.’’
‘‘My current hormone treatment is working well, until it stops working, and I’ve been told it will stop working, then they will try something else.’’
Breast Cancer Aotearoa Coalition chairwoman Libby Burgess said she believed the recommendations had been made as a cost-cutting exercise as it excluded so many women from being able to access the drugs,
Stuff reported. "It’s just cruel, it doesn’t really make sense."