An Irish doctor in Tanzania racked up a bill of $50,000 paying for children’s chemotherapy before setting up a charity that helps hundreds of sick kids every day.
Dr Trish Scanlan, who has lived in the East African country for more than 15 years, has significantly improved survival rates for kids with cancer while also battling the disease herself but declared “more work needs to be done”.
The paediatric oncologist, 49, said while the number of children surviving has gone up considerably it’s still not good enough.
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She now helps provide free chemotherapy to all Tanzanian childhood cancer patients through a charity she helped found called Their Lives Matter.
Speaking to the Irish Mirror from the Muhimbili National Hospital in Tanzania, Dr Scanlan said: “We have to come up with €1.5million every year to pay for what we do.
“It’s almost more difficult than looking after a sick child, trying to make sure you have enough money at the end of each month.” Back in 2007, Dr Scanlan racked up the medical bill when she first went back to Tanzania following a brief stint in 2006 because she began to pay for the chemotherapy drugs without donor support.
She said she couldn’t face seeing children not make it.
Dr Scanlan explained: “Initially, the kids had to buy the chemo so most children disappeared after one or two cycles. I watched that for a few months. It wasn’t a lack of willingness, effort, or compassion from the doctors and nurses.”
She credited the doctor and nurses working on the wards at that time for their incredible dedication.
The medic explained: “The problem was literally they didn’t have the chemo to give the children and – fun fact – you can’t cure cancer without chemotherapy.”
“I was watching children come in and be given a prescription and being told to go off and buy the chemo and just seeing them not come back or coming back with one of the four drugs they needed.
“I really couldn’t stand the fact so many kids with curable conditions were dying. We had to do something. So on the ward one day, I just said ‘chemo is free’.
“I had no way of paying for it. I had no big investors, I wasn’t linked to any organisation at the time.
“We were lucky in a sense because all the local pharmacies stocked chemotherapy so we were able to order it from all over the city… I built up a bill of $50,000 from about ten different pharmacies with no way of paying for it.
“Then what started to happen was kids started to get better and more started coming in and it just got
livelier and busier and so visitors would come and could sense the change and ask what was new and how could they help sustain this. I’d reply and say, ‘Oh, we decided to give the kids the chemo’ and I’d say, ‘If you want to help - here is an invoice you can maybe help with’.
“We worked the opposite way to most organisations – we spent the money on the children proving our model worked and then we looked for the actual funds.
“People started believing in us and the money started to appear.”
“Once we started using the chemo the team needed a bit more training around how to manage protocols, side-effects and assess treatment responses and I just happened to have those skills too so it was a perfect fit for me.
“It’s so rare to find a place that fits your skills with its needs so perfectly. They just needed the support of a bossy European who could ask for things and was willing to break rules.
“Tanzanians are very modest gentle people. I have been so happy playing that part for over a decade.’’
Dr Scanlan was diagnosed with breast cancer twice while working to improve the survival rate
of Tanzanian children with cancer.
She said it showed her just how incredibly brave and stoic children in Tanzania are and how they were “a whole lot braver than she was at the time”.
Dr Scanlan revealed the first time round she was given a high chance of survival but when she relapsed those odds fell to 20%.
She explained how living through the experience she realised: “In general statistics are helpful as a guide but they’re kind of meaningless when you’re the patient because you don’t know where you fall in them.”
Speaking about her relapse compared to the initial diagnosis, Dr Scanlan said: “It was a completely different experience, it was different because I thought I was going to die. I was sure I was going to die in fact.” Incredibly, Dr Scanlan was able to beat the disease both times and is now cancer-free.
She also said her diagnosis made her a “much better doctor”, understanding what the children face when they are given treatment and how “chemotherapy really can suck”.
Dr Scanlan stressed: “There’s so much support a patient can have to make the experience more bearable.”
She now concentrates a lot more on this aspect of care these days.
Dr Scanlan added: “I’m super proud of the changes we’ve achieved so far. My role has evolved over the years.
“These days my main role is as the person who keeps coming and annoying people to do better, strive harder and increase the success. I’m super proud but it’s still a little disappointing we’re not further.
“I’ve been here 15 years and we’ve gone from a survival rate of less than 10% to more than 50% and from treating 100 kids to more than 700 kids which sounds great.
“Until you realise two things, the first being we’re still only reaching about 25% of the kids in need and second, we should be curing 85% of our patients.’’
“It’s a long journey for us and for the children. We should be able to reach every child. A lot of the time children are dying before they even come to us.”
Dr Scanlan said she and her team’s goal is to try and cure all the children battling the disease but equally important for those who come too late is to ‘’try to figure out how to give each child their very best day every single day even if their lives are limited”.
She also credited CHI at Crumlin and other Irish hospitals – including Beaumont and St James’, for their continued support, expertise and invaluable help.
Dr Scanlan said access to services such as pathology, haematology and clinical chemistry services in CHI along with medical and surgical paediatric specialists remains essential for the children’s cancer service.
She added the generosity of the teams at these centres “feels really unique to Ireland”.
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