Let's Get Sylvia some treatment

Hi, my name is Peter.

This is a story that made me pause, a story that struck at the heart of our values, filled with a rollercoaster of hope and despair but ultimately one of how much is a life worth.

My friend Sylvia was diagnosed with AML (Acute Myeloid Leukaemia), an aggressive form of Leukaemia in Ghana at the beginning of May.

Sylvia is a hard-working, self-employed, single parent of two beautiful young children, hoping to see them get through primary school and grow happy, knowing that Mummy would be there for them.

She is also the primary caregiver to her 93 year old mother, and was having to take over the running of her mother’s charity, the New Horizon Special School for the intellectually disabled, when this sudden news hit her.

The news was earth shattering and difficult to absorb. What could she do? She was referred to the main Hospital in Accra (Korle Bu Teaching Hospital) but they did not have

1. The right equipment to diagnose the type of leukaemia Sylvia had,

2. The right type of chemo for treatment of AML and

3. Instead, administered a generic chemo which was not targeted to treat AML.

After a week or so Sylvia was left in a bad way and, found out later that the doctors had totally given up on her chances of survival. No one had a cure for her in Ghana, and the doctor was candid enough to admit that.

After scrambling around for a place to get treatment outside of Ghana, a Doctor from one of London’s premier cancer treatment Hospitals, [UCLH] came across her case on a cancer forum, and offered to treat her if she could get to London immediately. This lifeline was for private treatment so while hospitalised she scrambled for £114K which was needed for the treatment and was airlifted to London as an emergency patient. However, this turned out to only cover the first course of treatment which lasted a month. She has since forked out a further £25K from a loan she received from a friend in the UK just for tests to find out how well the chemotherapy had worked. The initial course of chemo worked well but according to most experts the second course of chemotherapy should have commenced within a month of finishing the first, but the private care provider HCA Healthcare has refused to start the second cycle until she can fork out a further £50K for it. At the end of it they would be expecting her to pay £150K for a bone marrow transplant.

To compound all this the person who loaned her the initial £115K is asking for his money back after changing his mind about the length of time required to pay him back. Sylvia is facing bills well north of £350K without which she will not get treatment and without the treatment, it is likely the cancer will return.

Her call to the leading hospital in Ghana to ask if she could continue treatment there if she managed to purchase the drugs in the UK did not receive any hopeful response. The doctor told her they were not trained to handle her specific drugs. There seemed to be no hope anywhere.

She has let her six-year-old twins in the care of a nanny, and her mother is also gravely ill in Ghana. The charity they run is currently without a Head to take decisions for these special needs children. It is imperative that she finds the funds to repay the loans and complete the treatments, so she can return to Ghana.

I hope you can find it in your heart to help us reach this goal.