Nurse pleads for chemotherapy cash

A Palmerston North nurse is being forced to make a public plea for money for chemotherapy treatment, as the trust her cancer specialist directed her to has run out of funds.

Breast cancer sufferer Lynette Brunton needs $96,000 for chemotherapy that could save her life.

The 45-year-old is able to get the first course of drugs free, but will have to pay for crucial second and third courses, which are not funded by the state.

Ms Brunton does not have the money to pay for the treatment.

"I thought I was going to my oncologist, but it turned out I needed a banker," says Ms Brunton, who was diagnosed in July.

Ms Brunton is the younger sister of Owen Brunton, who was killed at Manfeild in July while competing in a motorcycle race.

She said asking for money is humiliating.

"You have to put yourself out there and say, 'Hey, look at me', for something that's not the best of reasons."

Initially, her oncologist believed a Feilding trust set up to help cancer patients would be able to pay. But it has run out of funds.

Ms Brunton needs the drug Taxotere for the second course of chemotherapy at a cost of $16,000. A third course with another drug, Herceptin, will cost $80,000.

The single mother of two (Rebecca, 20, and Shane, 24) says she is fighting to live for the sake of her children, after she lost her own mother to breast cancer.

She has had regular mammograms since her early 20s, after her mother died at the age Ms Brunton is now.

At the time, Ms Brunton was 17, and left her enrolled nursing course to care for her mother.

Her own daughter has done the same thing - interrupting her final year of registered nurse training to care for her.

Ms Brunton's ordeal began in July, when she felt a shooting pain in her breast while she was working as a nurse at the Olive Tree Apartments and Rest Home.

After other symptoms appeared, she sought another mammography. She was phoned at work a week later and told to come in on July 14.

"They scanned me and carried on with a biopsy the same morning. They basically told me the bad news when I was lying there having the scan. They said it was a mass. That hit me pretty hard."

The first person she told was her big brother Owen. "I had to tell him first."

Surgeons operated on the mass within 10 days. And while in hospital recovering, she heard her brother had been killed.

Ms Brunton had her right breast removed, as well as 29 of 42 lymph nodes from under her arm and neck on that side. The tumour was grade three - the worst.

She has had her first course of the free chemotherapy. And now, apart from the Glow Light Trust, she has no options.

The ordeal has been overwhelming. "I nearly cried," Ms Brunton said. "You are taking in all this new information about the cancer, and they don't paint any pretty pictures. They give it to you straight."

She is aware her chances without the necessary treatments are slim.

"When you are first told, all you think about is death. Then it later becomes about living. And of course, you want to try anything."

- NZPA