I’ve got four days to save my husband
Wife must raise £400,000 for leukaemia treatment
THE wife of a man dying of cancer has just four days to raise £400,000 so he can receive life-saving treatment in America. Kate Robertson, 33, made an emotional plea for donations so her husband Mike Brandon, 31, can take up his place on a new clinical trial which could cure him of leukaemia.
Launching an online fundraising campaign, she released a heart-breaking video begging people to share his story and donate to the cause.
Fighting back tears, she said: ‘I’m sure you can all imagine what it is like being faced with losing the most important person to you.
‘Please help me combat what we’re facing. I know with your help we can get him to where he needs to be.
‘We can’t go down without a fight. You hear of miracles all the time, they are rare but they happen.’
After exhausting all the cancer treatments available on the NHS, the
‘We can’t go down without a fight’
pioneering treatment being trialled in Philadelphia from May 3 is Mr Brandon’s only hope of survival.
Miss Robertson said the trial is also the only chance that the couple, who married last year, have of starting a family. ‘I want to have a baby. That’s what people should be doing after their first year of marriage,’ she said.
‘They should be planning their family, not planning a funeral.’
Last night the total raised on the couple’s GoFundMe page stood at more than £220,000 after donations poured in from around the world. At one point the site crashed under the sudden influx of web traffic.
Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania’s Abramson Cancer Centre have had success in fighting leukaemia by engineering immune cells to target the blood cancer.
The centre funds the cost of the drug treatment but requires £400,000 up front to cover all other medical care costs, including a series of consultations, scans, biopsies and chemotherapy.
Zoology graduate Mr Brandon, from Bristol, was diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukaemia in January 2014 a month after the couple got engaged.
After a campaign to find him a stem cell donor went viral, he underwent the transplant on his 30th birthday in June that year.
Since then he has undergone more than 20 gruelling bone marrow biopsies, and a further five stem cell and white blood infusions.
Despite the setbacks, including a sudden bout of ill health just a week before the ceremony, the couple were finally able to get married last summer. ‘It was an incredible day,’ said Miss Robertson. ‘My favourite part was the ceremony. Our hands remained tightly clasped together throughout. To finally get to that day was such an achievement.’
But their hopes for the future were dashed when Mr Brandon suffered a serious relapse this Easter, and they were given the crushing news that there were no treatments left on the NHS for him to try – leading them to look for treatments abroad. Miss Robertson said: ‘Being told that Mike had suffered a massive relapse was like being smacked in the face with a brick.
‘When you are faced with knowing you don’t have much time you can either curl up in a ball and be miserable or make as much of your time as you can.
‘Mike has so much love and strength that we have to exhaust all options.’ Any spare money raised will be donated to the Bristol Haematology and Oncology Centre.