A North Bay mother is back from Ottawa where she met with MPs this week to advocate for better access to cancer care as part of the Canadian Cancer Society’s annual daffodil campaign.
Renee Meyer’s daughter, Ava Sevier, now 12, was diagnosed with Neurofibromatosis Type 1 when she was just more than a year old.
“She went through a year and a half of chemotherapy to stabilize the tumour and unfortunately she lost complete vision in her left eye,” said Meyer.
Ava has to attend McMaster Children’s Hospital and The Hospital for Sick Children (SickKids) in Toronto twice a year for monitoring.
MRIs are required when she's having new symptoms or to monitor a tumour that’s near her spine. While the tumours are currently benign, doctors have told her that there’s a slight chance they will turn malignant.
“Because of Ava’s condition, she has tumours that can grow anywhere on the body that there are nerves,” Meyer said.
“So she does have internal tumours around her organs.”
While she was in Ottawa, Meyer and more than 20 other Canadian Cancer Society volunteers, caregivers and advocates from across the country who are impacted by cancer met with parliamentarians to advocate for better cancer care access.
“We were bringing forward six key recommendations to elected officials,” said Kelly Wilson Cull, the Canadian Cancer Society’s director of advocacy.
“They dealt with the bigger buckets of prevention, tobacco control, access to care -- which is a huge issue to many Canadians – (and) we talked about palliative care as well as research and innovation.”
Meyer said they were well received and genuine connections were made with the MPs she spoke with.
“At least 70-80 per cent of all of the MPs were wearing the daffodils,” she said.
“It showed that it didn’t matter what your political standpoint is. Cancer is something that we can all work on together.”
Meyer and the other advocates found that learning how the individual provinces spend federally allotted health care money is key.
The next thing on her agenda is scheduling a meeting with MPPs at Queen’s Park and find out how Ontario is using its portion
She’s doing all this work in love of her daughter.
“Unfortunately Ava’s cancer is not curable,” she said.
“So I’m on the search to try to find a way to change that.”
