Help Annette Huggett in her brain cancer battle

Hi, my name is Sam and I’m fundraising to cover the cost of cancer treatment for my mum, Annette.

In January, my mum had a number of unexpected and frightening seizures one night and sadly we discovered the cause was an aggressive brain tumour. My mum had to undergo major brain surgery.

The good news is that she recovered well however they gave us the bad news that they weren’t able to remove all of the tumour. Things got worse when tests revealed she had a high-grade glioblastoma. This is an incredibly aggressive brain tumour, one which will drastically reduce her life span.

Annette had planned to retire this year and travel, but her plans have had to be cancelled due to the diagnosis.

My mum has spent much of her life living healthily so it is a great shock to us all that she is facing such a life altering brain tumour diagnosis. Her devoted husband Philip is now driving Annette to all her appointments and supporting her every step of the way, while himself struggling to come to terms with the news.

Annette has since started a 6 week course of radiotherapy and chemotherapy. She attends hospital every single day for her radiotherapy. She is understandably finding this quite challenging and overwhelming, both mentally and physically.

But Annette has found a light in the darkness, a treatment that is routinely offered in the USA called OPTUNE. OPTUNE has been shown to improve the lives of brain cancer patients. It works by creating “Tumour Treating Fields” which help to slow down or stop cancer cells from dividing. This helps to prevent the tumour from growing or spreading so quickly. Clinical trials have shown a significantly increased survival time with maintained quality of life compared to chemotherapy alone.

However, her hopes were dashed when she learned that OPTUNE is not currently available on the NHS. We were hoping our insurance company would cover the cost of at least some of the treatment as we have extended cancer cover. Unfortunately, this has been rejected so we will need to fund the equipment ourselves.

This treatment currently costs approximately £17,500 per month. Annette would love to be able to have this treatment for the rest of 2023 which will cost a staggering £150,000. As a family we simply can’t begin to find this amount of money, so we are pinning our hope on the kindness of strangers. Strangers who we hope will consider donating to help her have a little bit more time with us.

Even a small donation of £5 will mean the world to us.

Thank you so much for taking the time to read our story and Annette, Philip and I would be extremely grateful for anything you can donate.

If you feel you can’t donate at this time, it would still be a huge help if you could share our story on social media.