This is about a week early, but the reason is a good one.
Chevrolet has announced it’s participation towards World Cancer Day by setting up a Purple-Your-FB-profile-picture fund. Every share and purple-ing of your profile picture on FB will be noted from the website, and $1 will be donated up to the $1,000,000 mark to the American Cancer Society. Proceeds will be allotted to help cancer patients with treatment costs, transportation, and whatnot. AND…it’s free cost on your part!
Purple Roads Cancer Day
For those of you who may not know exactly how much cancer costs, let me throw out a few figures. All of these are from personal experience and what essentially was “billed” for one chemotherapy session:
- medication/chemotherapy (4 drugs, 2 anti-emetics, saline flush, heparin flush) = +/- $18,000
- doctor visit = $200-$300
- laboratory (for bloodwork and cell counts) = $300
Labwork is required because if the blood counts are too low to support chemotherapy, the patient cannot receive the medication that day. Otherwise there is too much fear of complete obliteration of the immune system which would make the patient more vulnerable than they already are to infection.
Total for one round of chemotherapy is approximately then = $18,600.
Hodgkins Lymphoma patients have to go 12 rounds = 12 x $18,600 = $223,200.
That’s enough for a college education at an upper ranked institution, a masters degree, a house, multiple cars, or possibly retirement for many.
For your routine scans say…CT scans from the neck to pelvis: $7000-$8000. For Stage IV cancer survivors, scans are supposed to be every 3 months, that puts it around 4 times a year, depending on when you finish treatment. However, assuming it is in January, total follow up scan costs would equate to about $28,000. This doesn’t count labwork and doctor visits that also happen every 3-4 months during the year.
For the handful of people who read this blog, I hope that you pass it on to one friend, and that friend to another, and to another. Let us hope that our tiny ripple effect will help Chevy get to its $1,000,000 for the American Cancer Society!
Live Healthy!
R/g
Rammiegirl 2.0 