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 $US370,000

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