Last-ditch effort to make treatment publicly available
She paid $6000 to have all the radiation therapy she needed administered in one hit.
When Megan Banks turned 45 she was called up as part of the national breast screening programme for a mammogram — which found she had cancer.
The Orewa project manager was diagnosed with stage two breast cancer and had a partial mastectomy to remove the tumour.
She paid $6000, half the normal cost, to have all the radiation therapy she needed administered in one hit during the surgery.
The Intrabeam intraoperative radiotherapy [IORT], which is not yet publicly funded, saved Banks from having the radiation once a day, five days a week for six weeks after the surgery.
That Banks was even diagnosed with the discshaped lump that was undetectable from the outside is light years ahead of the diagnosis of breast cancer even 50 years ago.
But she says in 2018 the oneshot breast radiation, a technology estimated to be clinically suited to 700 women per year, should be publicly funded and Banks supports a petition to the Health Select Committee by breast cancer surgeon Dr Erica Whineray Kelly.
Whineray Kelly’s 3116-signature petition is a lastditch effort by her after a five year campaign to get the IORT machine funded.
But while treatment for early stage breast cancer in New Zealand was world class, advanced breast cancer treatment left women dying faster than in other countries according to new research.
The report commissioned by the New Zealand Breast Cancer Foundation found women, and men, whose breast cancer had spread to other parts of the body died faster than their counterparts in Australia, France and Germany.
And the five-year survival rate for Ma¯ ori was just 5 per cent, compared with 15 per cent for non-Ma¯ ori.
Whineray Kelly said it was very hard to get patients with metastatic breast cancer to have more treatment.
Reasons for that included access to drugs, financial implications, that clinicians were competing with alternative medicines and cultural barriers.