To the Editor:

First I have to say thank you for all the help in the past with your contributions for my sister, Ruth Savino’s uncovered cancer bills over the last four-and-a-half years and for your prayers. Truly, if it weren’t for all of you, it would have been a disaster.

Ruth now has Stage IV metastatic breast cancer to the bone, which is still treatable and every day they release new meds to do just that.

For those who were asking how to help Ruthie now that her insurance says she has reached her cap for the year, this is how:

There is a tax-deductible account at the Westerlo Reformed Church, Post Office Box 70, Westerlo, NY  12193 where you can send donations that go just for Ruth’s medical bills and medicine costs. Please put “For Ruth Savino” on the comment line. If you need a receipt, please enclose a self-addressed, stamped envelope for Ray, our church treasurer.

As you may already know that Ruth told me, “Absolutely no fundraisers.” This is not a fundraiser; it’s a donation.

There is absolutely no overhead with the church unlike with Go Fund Me, which takes money off of the top. And the American Cancer Society does not help individual patients nor does the Hope House in Latham.

Hope House gives you hope and will teach you how to cook and will give you a free wig if they approve you as they did Ruth. But to go there for support and hope, it’s too far from Westerlo, especially during the winter from hell!

So whatever you may be able to afford at this time could be helpful till July 1 as Ruth gets Medicare and Social Security. After over four years of being sick and many appeals, they approved her but not starting until July 1. Don’t you love the red tape of the government?

Again, I am writing this appeal as I have had several people ask me how they can help Ruth pay for her chemo medicine in that her insurance company notified her on the last day that we were on vacation (this past Friday) that they will no longer cover any of her medicine as of April 18.

Both Ruth and her husband, Steve, are on disability. Steve had a defibrillator put in so he can no longer drive truck.

“Sorry but you die now” is how we see this last email on Friday from her insurance company. We were very upset as her scan in March showed this new stronger chemo was shrinking the cancer in the bones, which she only started in January. Up to this point, all other chemo meds have failed and that’s why it spread to her bones.

She’s too proud to do another fundraiser and that’s because some nasty, ugly, selfish, cowardly person sent her an anonymous letter in the mail telling her to stop begging for help and get a job. I don’t usually wish people bad but I am hoping karma gets that person.

Ruth said she would live under a bridge before she would let me do another fundraiser. That person should walk all day in her shoes.

Oh wait, she can’t walk all day and that’s the reason she needs a wheelchair to navigate when out shopping or me dragging her through Disney! I now know I have muscles I haven’t used in a long time so I am getting back on the treadmill.

We spent one entire day on vacation in the emergency room while in Disney as her new chemo meds can and will affect her sugar, which went down to 26 and she was becoming unresponsive, at which time I called the ambulance. But she did great and the EMTs and paramedics could not believe she was talking with a sugar that low.

She yelled at me for sticking her fingers too many times the next day, but didn’t remember me doing it, the ambulance ride, or arriving in the ER. Whew — we dodged a bullet!

And thank you for all the generous people who gave us money for the “Disney Trip” on her bucket list, which her oncologist told her in December to “work on.” So that money along with my points for airlines, my points for a rental car and points for most of the room ended up almost free.

And thank you for all the folks who sent her gift cards so she had personal money to spend while there. It was a trip of a lifetime for her — her first time to Disney ever!

Several times she said, “I hope I live long enough I can come back with all my grandchildren when the baby is old enough.” (He’s only a month old now!)  I hope so, too, and there is no way she won’t have her medicine and, if it means I never retire, so be it.

Whatever you can send to the church would go directly and only to medical bills. If something were to happen to Ruth, it would go to help another person who needs it and not just disappear.   

P.S. Don’t tell Ruthie I asked for donations to the church.

We are also appealing to the drug makers for co-pay cards or free meds. But, even if we do get them, she still has weekly co-pays and deductibles to meet, which will also be the case when her Medicare comes through. The cost for the oral tablets is around $14,524 for a supply of 28.

Betty Ann Filkins

Westerlo