Thanks to the very generous fundraising efforts from family friends, businesses and strangers both within Australia and worldwide, Graham was able to have his life-saving double-cord blood stem cell transplant at the Seattle Cancer Care Alliance (SCCA) in August 2008.

Unfortunately, the journey has been much longer than we expected and Graham has had several complications with his treatment that have led to extra hospital stays and significant increases in the original expectation of a cost of US$500,000 for the total treatment.

We arrived in April and expected to stay for 4 months with a total hospital stay of around 20-30 days. The reality is that his disease had relapsed on arrival and it took two cycles of chemotherapy (one cycle using a clinical trial drug), a bout of fungal pneumonia and 2 months as an inpatient to get his disease back into remission. As each night's stay in the hospital comes at a cost of $5,000 for the room alone, you can see how the bills have mounted.

After the transplant, Graham developed steroid resistant Graft vs Host Disease (GVHD) of the gut, which is a very serious and life-threatening side-effect of the transplant. This meant another month in hospital and another clinical trial to get the the disease under control.

He is now out of hospital and the GVHD is resolving thanks to some very innovative and cutting edge treatments.

We met with our Attending Doctor on the 24th October and he thought Graham was in a good position to come home, so they brought forward all his discharge tests by two weeks and we arrived back in Melbourne on the 29th October.

We are so very grateful of the all the support we have received to enable Graham to have his treatment and it is a eurphoric feeling to know that this part of the journey is done and we are now all home together.

But we have to ask your help again to try and raise some more funds to pay the hospital bill.

The bottom line is that we have spent the $419,000 deposit we gave the SCCA in April, we gave them another $50,000 before we left and we still owe them an additional $416,000.

 

Thank-you once again for your support in helping Graham battle this terrible disease.