No doubt many of you will have your summer in the sun, but with our outdoor lifestyle in New Zealand comes the highest rates of melanoma in the world. It kills one person every day and if you end up with advanced melanoma, there is currently nothing that can save your life that the Government helps pay for.
Story went to meet Leisa Renwick who was sent home from hospital to die.
"For six months I just ran on anger because I felt like I'd been written off. I felt like I wasn't worth saving," says Ms Renwick.
Three weeks earlier, she had been feeling queasy as she taught her maths class in Mt Maunganui College.
She is 47 years old and has never sunbathed, yet she had been diagnosed with advanced melanoma.
Her doctors said they could not save her life and offered her chemotherapy treatment, which does not cure advanced melanoma. But her oncologist the asked if she could afford to buy her life back and she started a private course of a drug called dabrafenib.
Four months later, her scan was startling. She was in complete remission and all the cancer was gone.
But dabrafanib is not offered by the public health system and neither is the next step, Keytruda, also known as pembrolizumab.
"Dabrafanib gets you out of the fire, but pembrolizumab saves you," says Ms Renwick.
So why are Kiwis missing out on the cutting-edge melanoma treatments?
Ms Renwick is determined to change this and will be delivering a petition to Parliament tomorrow asking for an increase in Pharmac's budget so everyone who needs pembrolizumab can get it – the drugs that have saved her life.
Watch the video for the full Story report.
