ZEEBRAZONE

10:39am Saturday 4th December 2010

A MOTHER-OF-THREE with terminal cancer has been granted Government funds to help pay for life-prolonging drugs unavailable to her on the NHS.

Trudy Cusworth, 40, of Gateforth, near Selby, was diagnosed with an aggressive form of breast cancer in 2006, and underwent surgery, chemotherapy and radiotherapy to fight the disease. But in January, tests showed the cancer had spread to her lungs and lymph nodes.

She said: “I had been in remission for about three years, but in January it came back.

”I had six bouts of chemotherapy which shrank the cancer to the point where they couldn’t see it, but after more scans in September they found it had grown back.”

Trudy was told by her oncologist at St James’s Hospital in Leeds that she could benefit from the new drug, Avastin, which she accepted would not cure her illness, but could prolong her life.

Trudy said: ”Nobody knows how long the Avastin would give me; it depends on how I respond to it. It could be as little as six weeks, but I believe the average is 29 months. I read about a lady who funded her own Avastin treatment in 2006 and is still in remission.”

“I’m quite an optimistic and positive person and was hoping they would say yes, they’d give me the treatment on the NHS, but they turned me down. To make it worse, on the day I was refused the treatment, I was told my father had a terminal, inoperable brain tumour.”

After NHS treatment was refused, Trudy’s friends and family started Facebook groups and an online petition (www.trudycusworth.com), to challenge the decision from the National Institute for Clinical Excellence not to make Avastin generally available. The petition gained more than 550 signatures from around the world.

Trudy feared that to see her children Nathanial, 11, Dylan, seven, and Jasper, five, grow up, she may have to raise the money for the £20,000-a-year drug herself, so her consultant applied for funding from the new £50 million cancer drugs fund set up by the Government. Yesterday, Trudy found out her application had been successful, and though an amount has not yet been named, the Government would be providing funds towards the Avastin. She said: “Obviously, I’m very thrilled, this is the result I wanted. The generosity of the public offering to donate has been fantastic, but rather than taking donations from people, the Government will be paying towards the treatment.

”I’m still not ready to go. They say life begins at 40, not ends. I’m hoping it will give me a lot more than six months, but anything is a benefit. I have got a lot of determination and hope I will be receptive to it. Six weeks is an eternity if you have young children.”