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 Whangārei’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
(eribulinmesylate), which costs $8580 for each three-week cycle in New Zealand but is completely funded in Australia.
Since July, Mcintyre has spent more than $50,000 on this treatment, using money raised through fundraisers, plus a recent payout from ACC to acknowledge the misdiagnosis.
But this has only partly kept the cancer at bay and a recent scan showed while the cancer in her breast is reducing, other spots have appeared in her lungs.
Mcintrye has been told she needs Trodelvy (sacituzumab govitecan-hziy), a combined chemotherapy and antibody treatment specially designed for her condition.
But this new treatment will cost about $55,000 every two weeks. It will cost $1 million for the entire treatment but it is Mcintyre’s best chance to have a future, she says.
‘‘There’s this new amazing medication but I can’t have it because I’m t oo poor ... This is someone’s life over funding. Only the really expensive drugs will work because what I have is so rare and aggressive, and they won’t fund those products for people like me, so I just have to pay up or die, pretty much.’’
Mcintyre is barely able to keep up with the cost for Halaven, which means she has to constantly fundraise.
Pharmac director of operations Lisa Williams said Pharmac could and would move quickly to fund new medicines that show significant health benefits.
However, neither Halaven nor Trodelvy had been approved by Medsafe for sale or distribution in New Zealand, and Pharmac had not had an application to fund either of those medicines, Williams said.