A Dublin man is making a public appeal for donations after his wife was diagnosed with Stage IV cancer and their only hope is an integrated oncology clinic in Thailand.
Graham Moles, originally from South Dublin but now living in Perth, Australia, is raising funds after his young wife Chanelle was diagnosed with Stage IV cancer. While the doctors in Australia are not giving them much hope, there is a clinic in Thailand where Chanelle was previously treated and where her cancer shrank significantly. However, the medical bill there is over €7,000 per week and they had to discontinue the treatment due to running out of funds.
Chanelle was 33 when she was finally diagnosed with Stage IV cancer, after being continuously misdiagnosed. The doctors previously believed her fatigue and worrying blood test results were due to a post-natal depression and anaemia since she had just given birth to baby daughter Eabha.
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Two and a half years later, Chanelle is still fighting with the support of her husband Graham, refusing to just accept her diagnosis as a death sentence and instead doing everything to overcome it. Their dream is to move with Eabha and their six-year-old son Marlon to West Cork where Chanelle sees herself growing old and grey with her husband.
Graham proudly said: “She's been through six surgeries, two clinical trials, countless rounds of chemotherapy, but she just won't give up.” When doctors in Australia told her she had exhausted all of her options with the exception of more medical trials, Chanelle visited an integrated oncology clinic in Thailand where she had an amazing response.
“She was in palliative care last October going to Thailand, and within two weeks she was walking around the shopping center feeling much better. The cancer had started shrinking in the scan within six weeks and it was a really positive experience.”
When Graham was visiting her, he also met with other cancer patients at the clinic whose cases were as severe as Chanelle’s. “The majority of them had fantastic responses and were at least on their way to recovery again, and had hope and really good reason for hope,” he said.
Chanelle had to leave the clinic after running out of funds but after a surgery in Australia, “the cancer just creeped up and got on top of her again quite quickly”. The family has raised over €50,000 already for her to go back, with Chanelle’s sister additionally organising a fundraising 200km cycle and Graham considering “taking the money out of the mortgage of the house” to fund her treatment.
They have already arranged for her to fly to Thailand with her mam this Saturday, while Graham will be staying at home to look after the children. He said: “The kids are young and resilient but — especially my six-year-old — is sensitive, he’s a mammy's boy and he misses his mam being there for him every day.
"It’s something we’ve been living with for over two years now but it's just progressively getting worse and we're a little bit more isolated, with Chanelle needing more care and me stepping in as the primary parent.” Graham had to drop his working hours from normal working hours down to about 20 hours a week. “I'm just basically just trying to move things around constantly to try and manage.”
The father-of-two is also calling for more awareness around bowel cancer. He said: “Bowel cancer is considered to be an old person's cancer. But more and more young people are dying from bowel cancer because it's going undetected because the screening age is over 50. And that means the younger people who are getting bowel cancer under 50, like Chanelle, it's going undetected until it's already stage four and it's then fatal… We’re very close to fatal.”
He added: “Chanelle is the love of my life, she's the most stubborn person I've ever met in my life. She's just not giving up and she won't give up, she can't imagine anything else than her growing old, to see her kids grow up. She’s got a clear vision of herself living in West Cork with long grey hair.”
Graham said that Stage IV cancer patients are given very little hope and that they have to fight for themselves, to advocate for themselves in the healthcare system. While lots of people just get their affairs in order and spend their last moments with their families, his wife refused to go that route.
He said: “Chanel’s just like, no, I'm not doing that. We're going to fight this. We're gonna win this battle. I can see we're getting out of this. She picked us up on her shoulders and she ran with their whole family to every clinic and every doctor specialist we can go to and we believe in her.”
You can donate to the GoFundMe page here.
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