Please help us extend April's life

Dear Family, friends and generous strangers with big hearts,

I am humbly asking for help for my good friend Roane April Joy Dean Rafols. April has been battling breast cancer since 2018. In that year she underwent two rounds of chemotherapy, 24 sessions. She was in remission for two years, closely monitoring her labs, but in 2020 the cancer spread to her liver and she endured another round of chemotherapy. In May 2021 another small tumor was found and she is now going for yet another round. Through all these treatments, April must continue to work at her job as a teacher in her adopted country of Thailand, to maintain the health benefits that allow her to have any treatment at all.

Battling cancer is hard but battling cancer in another country without any family members to surround you is harder. April’s brother James was with her to help her intermittently until May of 2021 but James had to go back home to the Philippines for good due to COVID. Fortunately, April’s warm, genuine and likeable demeanor had gained her many Thai friends that she considers family. Her ensemble of tight knit friends would take turns in taking her to her doctor appointments, drive her to a different province for chemo or radiation therapy and help her financially on times that she cannot send money back to the Philippines to help her nieces and nephews pay for schooling and for her mom’s care before she passed away in 2020 due to April being sick herself and cannot work for a period of time. April does not have any children of her own so she devoted herself to helping others. Her selfless acts of generosity with her time and finances are well known among all her family back in the Philippines and Thailand as she is always ready to help the next person in need.

As with so many cancer patients, this chemotherapy treatment is a grueling torture that far too often does not work, but breakthroughs have led to alternate cures, and hope is starting to glimmer for those able to access this new medical treatments. April has the chance to try an alternate drug recommended by her doctors called Fulvestrant.

From Wikipedia:

Fulvestrant, sold under the brand name Faslodex among others, is a medication used to treat hormone receptor (HR)-positive metastatic breast cancer in postmenopausal women with disease progression as well as HR-positive, HER2-negative advanced breast cancer in combination with palbociclib in women with disease progression after endocrine therapy.[2] It is given by injection into a muscle.[3]

Fulvestrant is a selective estrogen receptor degrader (SERD) and was first-in-class to be approved.[4] It works by binding to the estrogen receptor and destabilizing it, causing the cell's normal protein degradation processes to destroy it.[4]

Fulvestrant was approved for medical use in the United States in 2002.[5]

Fulvestrant is still under patent and is not cheap. The full program lasts a year and costs $24,000 with the following breakdown

Dose ------------------------------Date----------------- Bhat------------------ Dollars

First loading dose --------------Month 1------------- 100,000------------- $3,200.00

Second loading dose----------- Day 15 ---------------50,000 --------------$1,600.00

Last loading dose ---------------Day 30--------------- 50,000 --------------$1,600.00

Monthly dose -------------------11 months----------- 550,000 ------------$17,600.00

Total Cost:------------------------------------------------ 750,000 ------------$24,000.00

April can’t afford this treatment on a teacher’s salary and this treatment is not covered by the Thai health insurance system. April needs our help to get this chance for treatment and to live a normal life…….a chance for any life at all. Her options are running out and time is short.

Please join us in raising the money for April’s treatment. Any help you can give will go a long way. If all of us can join in, we can give her this chance! For anyone that cannot support this cause financially, we are calling for prayer warriors to pray for positive outcome and strength as she continue this difficult time in her life.

When April heard about this Go fund me effort, she wrote this text:

“Salamat gid sa inyo ni Oppa amiga! This means a lot to me. Thank you for helping me extend my life.”

Please help us extend April’s life………