As many of you may know, on June 1st 2016 our friend Amy was diagnosed with Breast Cancer.  A couple of days later we found out that it had already metastasized to the lymph node and lung.  Basically this means that Amy will need to receive treatment such as Chemotherapy for the rest of her life.  

How Life has Changed

Zoie and Amy are some of my longest and dearest friends. Most of us would have been crushed by what they have gone through in the past two years with Amy’s stage four cancer diagnosis. Amy and Zoie had to sell their precious business that they had spent years building and put every single goal and dream they had on hold to focus on treatment and being good parents to their kids.  Amy has had to let go of being a rock-star volunteer for school and a vibrant, energetic business women to take care of her body as it goes through the unimaginable array of side effects and exhaustion.
Each day her goal is to be able to get up with their daughter to make breakfast and take her to school. Many days, that requires a five hour nap to recover from that effort. Amy has had hundreds of appointments, endured excruciating treatments, and hospitalization for pain. She is currently dealing with problems with liver function that make her feel like she has a low grade stomach flu.

Zoie continues to work for her other company, but due to the unpredictable nature of Amy’s health and Doctors appointments, she is limited on leaving the house, which has had a significant impact on the family's income.

The Catastrophe during the Catastrophe

Amy and Zoie are extremely independent and have not really reached out for financial help during this time even in situations where they definitely could have used it for the many obstacles they have faced. Now two major changes threaten to be catastrophic financially for their family.

Insurance Change Effective Nov.1.  Due to Amy being disabled for two years, she now has been moved on to Medicare. While this is typically a more affordable insurance option, the timing couldn’t be worse.  Without going into all the complexities of Medicare, many of you will have heard of the “doughnut hole” This is a gap in coverage for medications. Amy’s medications, as most cancer drugs are, is very expensive so she immediately moves into the gap the first month of coverage.  Due to timing, she will face the “doughnut hole” in Nov. 2018 and again Jan.2019.  Most families could not absorb these costs into their budget and certainly not after 2 years of the financial strain of metastatic breast cancer.

**Nov.-Dec. 2018 Medicare Estimated Medication Cost to Amy- $3,329
**Jan. for the year of 2019 Medicare Estimated Cost to Amy- $7,224

The new insurance will not cover one of the chemotherapy medications that Amy is currently on.   Unfortunately Amy’s cancer is very aggressive and while treatments are usually very effective for the first few months, her cancer is able to adapt and render a given treatment useless in 4 to 5 months.  This means that Amy has already tried many of the more common chemotherapy drugs and is into the “specialty” category of drugs. She is currently on her fifth protocol and it is currently showing benefit, with significant decreases in the size of her tumor and lymph nodes.
  *Medicare does not cover this drug.  We are not sure why, since her previous insurance covered it and it is a generic.
  *Zoie is working on multiple ways to decrease the cost of this drug through coupons from the manufacturer, applying for a discount through the hospital and many more options.  Sometimes I think that Zoie’s full time job is managing insurance.

If you have ever tried to find out how much a prescription or procedure costs you will know that this is a maddening exercise futility.  The range is $1700 to $3000 per month.  
There is no other low cost alternative for her at this point she needs these specific medications. This is about as critical as it gets and they definitely need to make this goal!
The chemotherapy drugs have to be paid in full before the specialty pharmacy will mail them.  They do not do payment plans.
Amy and Zoie need to be prepared to pay the above amounts for 2018 on November 15th.

The Goal
The goal of this campaign is to cover the gap in prescription drug coverage as well as three months of cost for uncovered and minimally covered prescription drugs by November 15th, 2018.

These women are amazing and they have really put everything (financially and emotionally) into dealing with this cancer. But they NEED our help now. Please show these girls that they are not alone in this and help if you can!

Thank you.

Crystal Frank