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Supporting Matt Wilkie & his young family to fight cancer

$81,063 donated

Given by 860 generous donors in around 6 months

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Please get behind helping out the Wilkie family in this difficult time however you can.

Manawatu / Whanganui

After developing a cough, that steadily worsened and was undiagnosed for a number of months, Matt has been given the heartbreaking news he has Stage 4 bowel cancer that has spread to his lungs.

Chemotherapy is planned to begin immediately.

Matt is only 30 years old, he has 2 beautiful young boys (a 2 year old and 4 month old) and an amazing wife. He was fit and healthy with an active job and is a volunteer firefighter. He has never smoked. He is the kind of man that would do anything for a friend.

Matt and his family have already had to go through a private hospital to undertake the lung biopsy that found the cancer, and the medical bills won't stop there.

Please do all you can to help this beautiful young family in a time of need.

Thank you so much.

Greg Wilson's involvement (page creator)

I have benefitted from Matt's friendship for a decade. Raising funds for his family is the least we can do for him.

Use of funds

The main use will be to cover any private medical costs including unfunded treatment options. If they are fortunate enough to have any surplus funds, these will be used to help eliminate some of their debt.

Matt's progress on unfunded treatment 21 May 2022

Posted by: Caylee Wilkie

Hi everyone,

Life has been busy but we wanted to update you all. Chemo stopped working for Matt in December after 12 rounds so in January, he started on the unfunded treatment option. This is currently working well and CT results show that it has managed to keep Matt's cancer stable. We have almost finished paying for our portion of the drug costs before these get taken over by the drug companies. We have paid just over $25,000 for the cetuximab itself plus fortnightly hospital fees for this to be administered. As for the encorafenib tablets, these have cost us around $36,000 with one more month to pay at almost $9000. Once the drug companies begin to cover the cost of the drugs, our ongoing costs will be the administration of the cetuximab infusion and the courier cost for the encorafenib tablets which come from Australia.

Without your help, we would have struggled to come up with this money ourselves and this treatment may not have been an option. It is coming up 1 year since Matt's diagnosis and we are very lucky to have him still here with us after a grim prognosis in the beginning. Although we are unsure of what the future holds, we are staying positive and focusing on our time together with our two boys (who are now 15 months old and almost 4 years old).

Thank you from the bottom of our hearts ❤️

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