Help Lucy Receive Life Saving Treatment

Update from Lucy & her family -

Thank, you, thank, you, thank you all so much. 
Your response to this appeal has been utterly staggering. 
We are totally blown away by the generosity  you have shown towards us.
We thank each and everyone of you who have donated here, from the bottom of our hearts.
With all our love and thanks, Lucy & family



Please help us.

This is a huge ask for anyone to make, but we want to raise funds for life-saving and life-prolonging treatment for Lucy, a wonderful wife, mother and friend who is sadly battling stage 4 bowel cancer.

She needs a drug called Cetxuimab which is clinically proven to be an effective treatment of bowel cancer, that not only slows the disease but reverses it too; leading to the possibility of a cure and remission.

However due to the postcode lottery of the NHS this drug is not available to her here in England, despite being available in Wales and Scotland. The only choice we now have to try and control Lucy’s cancer and prolong her life is to try and fund this treatment privately.



Lucy's Story 

In 2019 Lucy, a fit, active and happy wife and mother of two young boys had just started working in her dream job – teaching at the nursery school in the village where she lives in  Brockham, Surrey.  Life was settled and the family had a bright and promising future.


In April that year however, they received the most devastating and unimaginable news – news which would tear her and her family’s life apart. Having suffered from repeated stomach trouble that spring, Lucy went to her doctor and was referred to the local hospital for further tests and investigation.

On April 18th when following a colonoscopy and CT scan she was told that at just 40 years of age, she had stage 4, incurable, Bowel Cancer. At this point the prognosis was bleak, there was a main tumour in her bowel and additional metastasis in her liver and lungs where the cancer had spread. She was put on to palliative chemotherapy to try and slow the spread of the disease and prolong her life as much as possible.

One of the treatments she was put on was a drug called Cetuximab, an immunotherapy treatment that worked alongside the other chemotherapies. Sadly Lucy had to leave her dream job she so loved at the nursery, as she couldn’t be around children with a compromised immune system, the risk of picking up an infection was simply too high. Now focusing on her treatment Lucy courageously
battled her way through nine months of sickness, fatigue, and hair loss, whilst trying to remain a mother to her beautiful young sons, then just aged 8 and 5. It was a gruelling 8 months for the whole family but Lucy’s strength and determination paid off as she was given the news that she had hoped for - she had responded well to the treatment, thanks to the drug Cetaximub which had finally given her a fighting chance to receive surgery.

An MRI scan showed that the Cetuximab had worked and the tumours in her liver were greatly reduced. Reduced enough in fact for her to undergo major liver surgery to physically remove the diseased parts of her liver. We were overjoyed as this was
not believed to be an option at diagnosis. For surgery to go ahead though, there had to be a break in chemotherapy in order for the body to be strong enough to withstand the procedure, and again afterwards while Lucy healed.



Following surgery she was now in a place we never thought possible, feeling stronger and more positive than at any point in the last year and with less cancer in her body. Then came the second blow. Despite the effectiveness of cetuximab against Lucy’s type of bowel cancer and the proven evidence that it was not only fighting the disease but beating it, NHS England have an unfathomable rule that if a person has received this life saving drug, but been off it for more than six weeks, it will not be funded for them again. So, in following the recommendation of her oncologist, and coming off cetuximab in order to have her liver resection – which reduced the amount of cancer in her body, Lucy was not allowed to go back onto this treatment in order to further fight the disease.

This would not have been the case had we lived in Wales or Scotland where it is freely available. It is impossible to comprehend why this is the case, when people’s lives are potentially cut short due to this rule which only exists in England. Subsequent chemotherapies have not been so effective and the disease has slowly spread.

Having been isolating for most of the past year and a half due to her vulnerable status, Lucy and her husband, Duncan, have had to deal with all the issues of the coronavirus pandemic by themselves. This has included increased difficulties in getting to hospitals, reduced visiting when Lucy has been in hospital, lack of contact with her oncology team and then the everyday stress of living with cancer and not
being able to see friends and family. Coupled with this they have had to home-school their boys too while Duncan has tried to hold down a full time job.



Now that restrictions are hopefully lifting and armed with their COVID inoculations the family hopes that they can make the most of the time they have left and all those friends and family that they have missed so much. We, as Lucy’s family and friends, feel so privileged to have Lucy in our lives, she is a beautiful, caring, funny and kind person – everything you could ask for in a friend, wife and mother. She has given us all so much joy in our lives. It has been heart-breaking for us to watch her going through all of this without being able to help.  As
we potentially see Lucy’s precious life gradually slipping away, we want to give her hope and time to enjoy life as much as she can. Funding cetuximab treatment for her will hopefully do this.

Thank you so much for reading, please do share this plea far and wide in hope that we can reach our fundraising target very soon, as time is sadly not in our hands. Please, please also help us raise awareness of the cancer drug funding issues that are playing Russian Roulette with people's lives.

Any money raised that cannot be used to fund Lucy's treatment will be used to support her children through an incredibly difficult and traumatic period in their lives. 


Lucy's family & friends x