In the words of my beautiful mum, this is her story ! XXX

My cancer journey started in February 2009. A year before I had started to feel very unwell, my symptoms blood in urine flu like symptoms hot sweats at night and loosing weight. These symptom were generally disregarded by my GP as Woman's things!!! I often wonder "why me" selfish as this may sound, but these are my thoughts and wanted to share this as often people feel guilty at my age, as my life has been full, loved my job as a nurse, dedicated 30 years of my life to the nhs I have had a lovely life married to a wonderful man have 4 beautiful children to which I am very proud as to how they have all turned out!

I was a staff nurse, and had recently started a new job at a private girls school in Ascot, loved this job!! 9 months in my symptoms came to a head, I felt very unwell months into my post, and this was again disregarded as swine flu!! A few weeks later I developed a lump in my collar bone, went back to GP, he back peddled sent me for tests, and shock and horror as I was diagnosed with stage lV advanced kidney cancer. I had private health insurance as wanted this ugly huge tumour removed from my body, and didn't want to wait. After surgery saw oncologist who basically said" I needed to get my affairs in order" It was suggested I had Interferon and Avastin. This was partly funded privately as not licensed, and had to remortgage our house to pay for some of the funds. We were in serious debt with only one wage coming in….. I was dismissed from my job as school nurse, as had not been there long enough and had a terminal diagnosis. I started my controversial treatment, and 8 weeks into treatment I suffered a hypertensive crisis, and my treatment was stopped. Initially I was hospitalized then went into hospice as expected to die due to heart problems and other numerous side effects. Not realizing this was just a way of my bodies immune system kick starting itself. I went into remission for quite a few years….until Feb 2016 when my cancer returned into the lymph nodes in my neck, I started on a treatment called Pazopanib, a new treatment designed to treat kidney cancer, unfortunately this stopped working in may this year, despite having undergone 2 lots of radiotherapy 6 weeks apart, my cancer is persistent.

I was referred for a second opinion at Royal Marsden to see Professor Gore, he has the key to other treatments and more widespread availability for trials. Having more options. The treatment that could be beneficial and proved successful in trials, is a drug that is licensed for Melanoma (skin cancer), unfortunately it is not licensed for kidney cancer, therefore the nhs or private health insurance will not cover the cost. The Drug called ipilimumab (yervoy) works in combination with the licensed drug nivolumab (opdivo) given together by Intravenous infusion come at great cost, £170k. But because the Niv (for short) is already licensed, I'm looking to raise 70k….a very large amount of money!!!

Nivolumab helps stop cancer cells from blocking the activity of your immunes system's T-cells. Ipilimumab works in another way to help increase the activity of your T-cells so they can attack and destroy the cancer cells.

Obviously this came at great disappointment and despair to know there is potentially something that could help but only available if you can cover the cost yourself. This is where I fall short, I do not have that sort of money and sure a lot of people like me do not have that sort of money. I am looking to raise funds so I can prove to everyone I can make it through a second time, and if I can survive this I'm sure this will be beneficial for future cancer research and useful for others going through this terrible dilemma. Maybe one day soon there will be a cure for cancer or a vaccine that can be given to help heartbreak it causes young and old.