Anne Mitchell says she’s ready to sell her house if she must to find the $52,000 necessary to pay for her chemotherapy drugs — medication sometimes covered by OHIP, but not in her case.

Mitchell, a 67-year-old grandmother of four, is going through her second bout of chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL). She found out that one of the chemo drugs she needs, bendamustine, is only covered by OHIP for first-line treatment, and this is Mitchell’s second experience with chemo.

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The other drug Mitchell requires, rituximab, is only covered when used with another medication, fludarabine, which Mitchell cannot take, as an adverse side effect caused her to become severely ill the last time she took it.

The Brampton resident says she’s the victim of bureaucratic technicalities, and it all came to a head earlier this month when she found herself paying for her first round of bendamustine — $4,550 — with her credit card in the hospital oncology unit.

“It was a complete shock,” said Mitchell, who says she gets very emotional when talking about the matter. “I just said, ‘What am I going to do?’”

Her daughter, Eleanor Elliott, has created an online petition calling on Health Minister Deb Matthews to ensure the chemo drugs are fully covered. The family argues that because Mitchell was unable to complete her first round of chemo treatments with fludarabine, she should be entitled to have bendamustine covered.

While Mitchell was able to pay for the first treatment of bendamustine, and the hospital covered the $4,200 for the first round of rituximab pending an appeal to the Health Ministry, she still needs five more treatments of each drug.

“I’m taking it basically one day at a time,” she said. “Both my husband and I are retired. We had put money aside for house renovations, so we’re using that, and when that runs out, we’ll borrow the money … Because what’s the alternative?”

A spokeswoman for Matthews, Samantha Grant, said the use of bendamustine for relapse CLL was reviewed in late 2012, but that “due to limitations with the clinical data, it was not recommended for funding since it was difficult to assess the benefit of this treatment compared to alternative treatments.”

As for rituximab, she said the decision was made to fund it in combination with fludarabine for second-line treatment because data showed “that rituximab-fludarabine demonstrate progression-free survival benefits in patients, and rituximab is well tolerated.”

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Elliott has reached out to her local MPP, Jagmeet Singh, and to Lymphoma Canada, who are attempting to broker a meeting between the family and Matthews. She wants to know why some provinces, like British Columbia, fully cover the drugs.

The manufacturer of bendamustine has agreed to cover 20 per cent of the medication’s cost to the family, said Elliott, but her mother must still pay for it up front and get reimbursed later.

She said what’s particularly frustrating is that her mother will be considered to be in remission for the rest of her life, and will need access to these drugs again.

“The whole point is to have a good, long remission period,” she said. “If she gets another 15 years, that’s more than we could hope for.”

Mitchell says she finds herself fortunate that she can dig into her savings to help cover the drugs, but wonders about others who might not have that option.

“What do they do? Walk out of the hospital and die?”

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