A WOMAN given just months to live by doctors survived "terminal" cancer after spending £21,000 on a drug not available on the NHS.
Barbara Moss and husband Mark were shattered when they were told she had between three and five months to live by a doctor at Worcestershire Royal Hospital.
Mrs Moss, 53, of Aconbury Close, off Newtown Road, Worcester, was so sure she was going to die of the "inoperable" bowel cancer which had spread to her liver she had even planned her own funeral following the bombshell in November 2006.
But after taking a course of Avastin and undergoing an operation she is now thriving and has called for the drug to be made readily available on the NHS.
She said: "When I went in to the hospital I didn't assume I would be coming out again. It was like a miracle. I had been planning my funeral - now I had life again. It was amazing, utterly overwhelming.
"I was accepting death but now I no longer feel like I have to accept it."
Her ordeal started when she was told she had between three and five months to live and the only treatment on the NHS was chemotherapy.
Refusing to give up the fight, the retired English teacher researched other treatments and used her own pension money to pay the £21,000 costs for a private course of Avastin, which attacks cancer cells in the same way our immune system fights a virus.
The drug was used alongside more conventional chemotherapy, including Irinotecan and Five FU, in four intravenous courses which caused the cancer to shrink so an operation could take place without killing her.
The tumour was successfully removed during a five-hour operation on the NHS at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Birmingham on October 4 last year.
Her illness forced her to take early retirement from teaching at Worcester's Blessed Edward Oldcorne and the Royal Grammar School.
She is now on a further course of Avastin to make sure the cancer does not return.
Mrs Moss wants to highlight the issue because she says Worcestershire Primary Care Trust refused treatment because the drug does not have official approval in the UK.
She believes if it had not been for private treatment at the Knightsbridge ward of Cheltenham General Hospital she would not be alive today and thinks it is "totally unfair" that other people with cancer should have to pay privately for the drugs they need to help them beat the disease.
Mrs Moss said: "They should be ashamed of themselves - of the way they turned down the case out of hand.
"People should be entitled to this. I would not have had my life extended without private medical health care."
Because they went privately they had to pay not only for the new drugs but also for the chemotherapy she was previously getting on the NHS.
A spokesman for Worcestershire Primary Care Trust said: "We are not able to comment on individual cases, but our policy is to refer to National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) guidance on specialist drugs for particular treatment and we adhere to their decision on whether there is clinical evidence."
A spokesman for NICE said the most recent study on Avastin, published last January, recommended that the drug was not cost-effective and there are other more cost-effective treatments.
This remains the position of NICE but it will be reviewed in May 2009.
She added: "There are almost no cancer drugs that are life-saving. They are nearly all life-extending."
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