A cancer patient has told how she feels she is being “left to die” because she is not eligible for potentially life-saving treatment on the NHS.
Gaidik Salmon says she has been told that her best chance of survival is “immunotherapy” treatment, which would cost around £100,000.
The drug she needs, Nivolumab, is not yet licensed for urothelial cancer, which is what Ms Salmon is battling, so her only hope is to pay for it privately.
The 50-year-old from West Hampstead said: “If I don’t have this treatment, I’m going to be in real trouble, I’m going to lose my life. I’m told it will cost £100,000 to have the treatment and I just don’t have it.”
Ms Salmon, who has been battling the illness, a type of cancer of the urinary tract, for six years, said her family have been able to fund the first couple of sessions of the treatment but she cannot continue without extra funds.
She said she does not have the strength to fundraise and does not know how to make an internet campaign go “viral”. Her family have now set up a fundraising page to help her.
“I’m in pain all the time, I’m lying down all the time, I just want to start feeling a bit better so my family got together and between them were able to raise some money so that I can at least start the treatment,” she said. “But there’s no chance we have the money to pay for the rest of it.”
Ms Salmon, who worked in commercial property development before she was diagnosed, added: “I’m just shattered I can’t have this treatment on the NHS, it’s so upsetting. It’s a matter of life or death, it shouldn’t be this way.”
The NHS funds immunotherapy for some cancers, but it has not been approved for urothelial cancer. It is possible for hospital consultants to make special case “individual funding requests” for the drug, but these are rarely approved. An NHS England spokeswoman said: “Nivolumab does not currently have a UK licence for the treatment of bladder cancer.
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“It is possible for clinicians to submit an Individual Funding Request for their patients to receive cancer treatments which have not been appraised by NICE or are not currently available via the Cancer Drugs Fund. In this case, no IFR has been received.”
Ms Salmon’s fundraising page is at crowdfunding.justgiving.com/givelifetogaidik
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