Finding effective treatment is difficult for people living with cancer in low- and middle-income countries. It can take years to start feeling better.
Christian, called Tian by his loved ones, works as a medical technologist at a private hospital in the Philippines.
He was diagnosed with chronic myeloid leukemia (CML) in 2012, when he was 17 years old. It was a shock for his family – they thought his weight loss was an adjustment to his second year of college.
The next few years were challenging in more ways than one. Tian’s parents were upset and worried about his diagnosis, and his siblings were too young to fully understand what was happening. Tian’s mother had to spend hours in government offices to apply for medical subsidies. And even with those, they had to borrow money from relatives and take out loans.
During this time, Tian also grew resistant to the medication. He had to try three different tyrosine-kinase inhibitors (TKI), a type of targeted cancer therapy. The fear and uncertainty every time a response failed was hard for his family to handle.
Then, three years ago, he joined one of our programs. Tian is now receiving a fourth medication free of charge and is responding well.
He and his mother still have to collect his medicine every three months. They leave at 8 p.m. and don’t arrive at the hospital until 6 a.m. the next day. However, Tian never complains.
Having access to treatment not only made him feel better, but gave him hope for the future. He said he’s grateful for the lifeline he’s been given.
“I hope Max will continue to help me and all the other patients who are continuously battling CML,” he said.
The Max Foundation is a leading global health nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating health equity. For 28 years, Max has pioneered practical, scalable, high-quality solutions to bring life-extending treatments and patient-centered health care to more than 100,000 people living with cancer and critical illness in low- and middle-income countries. Max believes in a world where all people can access high-impact medicines, where geography is not destiny, and where everyone can strive for health with dignity and with hope.
When a doctor requests treatment for a patient in an out-of-reach country, my job is to ensure medicine gets to that patient. Multiply this by 30,000 patients across 70+ countries, and our supply chain becomes a complex system of forecasting demand, requesting donations, shipping medicines, tracking product and confirming deliveries at each destination. I recently….
All of us at The Max Foundation are wholly committed to maximizing every opportunity to collaborate and build new partnerships on behalf of the patients we serve in low resource settings. We are excited to move onward to a new chapter with innovative opportunities to expand our impact. We hope you will see a place for yourself to join us in this effort to close the cancer divide!
Launched in 2015, Chai for Cancer USA raises funds to provide treatment access for patients in India. The campaign’s inspiration and namesake come from our own Region Head for South Asia, Viji Venkatesh, who started the original Chai for Cancer campaign in India one year earlier. For the past three years, supporters across the United States….
