Please support Penny with the cost and expenses in her fight with kidney cancer and help her stay as well as she can for as long as she can.
Hawke's Bay
Penny is a top level equestrian, representing NZ in dressage and is an Equestrian NZ High Performance Manager. She is also highly sought after as a trainer for riders of all levels throughout NZ. She has been and continues to be, a loved friend and mentor to hundreds of riders and is responsible for countless numbers achieving their competitive goals. Now it's our chance to help her.
Last year Penny and her husband lost their house and almost everything else in Cyclone Gabrielle. Then in March this year she was diagnosed with advanced kidney cancer which left her very few options. There are no funded treatments for advanced kidney cancer in NZ and just one unfunded treatment which is Immunotherapy using Keytruda. Unfortunately, even Keytruda is unlikely to be effective on its own meaning she will still need to access additional therapies.
Since her diagnosis, Penny's worked hard to research and understand her cancer. So with no options available in the NZ healthcare system apart from Keytruda, her only other choices are alternative treatments such as Electrotherapy, or treatments overseas both of which require funding. In particular there are some possible Targeted Therapies and a promising pioneering Radiotherapy treatment available in Australia which she may be eligible for.
Please help support Penny with the costs and expenses of the difficult journey ahead so she can explore every option. Penny is an important part of so many people's lives and we want to keep it that way.
Penny and I have been close friends for over 35 years.
Funds raised will be used to assist with covering the costs of treatments, medications (Keytruda), and associated travel and expenses both in NZ and overseas.
Update on Treatment and Page Closure 18 June 2024
As before, Penny wants everyone who has donated, sent beautiful messages or provided support in other ways, to know how grateful she is and how overwhelmed she continues to be by so many people's love and kindness.
Penny is now coming up to her third combination treatment of immunotherapy and TKR and it is fair to say the side effects have begun to kick in. As difficult as some of these are to manage, she is focussed on staying as strong as she can and is encouraged by some early positive signs. The donations received have been huge in helping to fund the first few therapies and will continue to be as the course of treatment progresses. However, the advice is that there will likely be no way to reliably measure the success of the treatment until around the six month point. On that basis, Penny would like to close this page for now and revisit later in the year if needed, once progress has been assessed and a decision made regarding continuing with an extended course of treatment.
So this page will no longer be active after 11:59pm on this Friday 21 June.
Of course if you want to continue to help and support Penny over the coming months, as I’m sure a lot of people will, please feel free to reach out to Penny herself, her family or close friends for guidance or updates.
Lastly there are no words to describe the value of the financial, practical and emotional support, everyone has been so generous in giving. Thank you all so very much!
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