A FAMILY battling breast cancer have issued a desperate plea for help.
Susie Payne is just 38 and mum to Albie aged six and Edith, aged three, and has been told by UK doctors she has just months to live.
But her devastated family is refusing to give up hope and Susie has since undergone treatment in Mexico under the care of Jason Williams, an American cancer specialist.
The first round of results have been positive but the family simply cannot afford to pay for a second dose of treatment.
Now, in a desperate bid to keep Susie alive, they have launched a ‘go fund me’ page to raise £120,000 to keep her alive.
“I can do £20,000, but we’re not rock stars,” said Susie’s husband Leo, who runs Studley Campers in Redditch.
“It’s the devil’s own game this.
“I have never asked for anything in my life and I find it really difficult to say I need help, but we do.”
It was in 2018 after the birth of their second child that Susie found a lump in her breast.
What followed was chemotherapy followed by surgery, a double mastectomy.
“Then she developed an unrelated pain in her abdomen and a scan found lesions in her lungs and I thought, ‘surely it can’t be that’,” said Leo.
Susie was diagnosed with Stage four cancer and given between 12 and 18 months to live.
“It’s not something we as a family could accept and I started doing some research and discovered there were other ways of treating her condition,” said Leo.
That research took him to the Jason R Williams Cancer Institute where they inject immunotherapy drugs directly into the cancer rather than using whole body chemotherapy as in the UK.
The family, who live in Studley, scrimped and saved to pay for a first round of treatment, but now a second one is needed.
Susie said: “Dr Williams is still confident that he can bring this cancer under control but more treatment is needed.
“A further four rounds would cost approximately £120,000. Such a huge amount of money we just don’t have.
“We are still being positive, we believe this can be controlled, we just haven’t managed it yet.
“I don’t like to ask people for things but we’ve managed to come so far and now is the time we would really appreciate your help.”
To donate to their campaign, which has so far raised £17,000, visit https://gofund.me/623b0a1e
