In
April 2007, 41 year old Graham Barnell was diagnosed with
a deadly type of leukaemia that affects less than 6 adults
a year in Australia and his only chance of survival was
a bone marrow transplant.

After searching the worldwide
registries for 9 months, the Australian Red Cross was unable
to find a suitable donor and in February 2008, his Doctors
told him he only had weeks to live without a transplant.

Undeterred by the Australian Government’s
refusal to fund treatment in the US, Graham’s friends
and family raised over $A400,000, enabling Graham
to travel from his home in Melbourne, Australia
to Seattle in
the USA for life-saving treatment in April 2008.

On Wed 6th August, he was the 8th person
in the world to receive a Double Umbilical Cord Blood Stem
Cell Transplant with ex-vivo expansion of one cord.

The treatment was a complete success and he is now leukaemia
free.

He is back in Melbourne, recovering from
the treatment but still has outstanding medical
bills of $US416,000

We have set up a not-for-profit trust fund to collect
and hold the money raised.

The trust is registered in Australia and the details are
as follows:

The Trustee for A Donor For Graham

ABN: 19 414 779 251

We are also a Registered Fundraiser with Consumer Affairs
Victoria and our registration number is 8607.

Please donate what you
can and pass on our details to all your contacts.

UPDATE
ON THE MEDICAL BILL

Thanks to the very generous
fundraising efforts from family friends, businesses and strangers
both within Australia and worldwide, Graham was able to have
his life-saving double-cord blood stem cell transplant at the Seattle
Cancer Care Alliance (SCCA) in August 2008.

Unfortunately, the journey has been much longer than expected
and Graham had several complications with his treatment
that led to extra hospital stays and significant increases
in the original expectation of a cost of US$500,000 for the
total treatment.

He arrived in April and expected to stay for 4 months with
a total hospital stay of around 20-30 days. The reality is
that his disease had relapsed on arrival and it took two cycles
of chemotherapy (one
cycle using a clinical trial drug), a bout of fungal
pneumonia and 2 months as an inpatient to get his disease
back into remission. As each night’s stay in the hospital comes
at a cost of $5,000 for the room alone, you can see how the
bills have mounted.

After the transplant, Graham developed steroid resistant Graft
vs Host Disease (GVHD) of the gut, which is a very serious
and life-threatening side-effect of the transplant. This
meant another month in hospital and another clinical
trial to get the the disease under control..

We are so very grateful of the all the support we have received
to enable Graham to have his treatment and it is a eurphoric
feeling to know that this part of the journey is done and we
are now all home together.

But we have to ask your help again to try and raise some more
funds to pay the hospital
bill.

The bottom line is that we spent the $419,000 deposit
we gave the SCCA in April, we gave them another $50,000 before
we left in October 2008 and we still owe them an additional
$416,000.

Thank-you for your support in helping
Graham battle this terrible disease.

Samantha, Jack & Poppy