‘Cancer is eating her alive’: Irish man pleas for help as wife suffers with breast cancer

A Dublin man has appealed for help for his wife, as “cancer is eating her alive”.

Every day, Ronnie O’Toole feels powerless as he sees his wife Gwen suffers.

Gwen was diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer to the sternum. While she was taking cannabis oil for one type of cancer, she learned that it can aggravate hormonal cancers.

Doctors found a second tumour in 2021. Now, Gwen says she has “two pot holes” in her chest which are causing her excruciating pain.

“Nothing that they have given me has worked. Chemo, targeted treatment, TDM1, oral chemo, OxyContin, oxynorm, gabapentin, Morphine, Sevredol, palladone. All at different time of course. Nothing is stopping my cancer from growing nor taking my pain away apart from this new alternative treatment which is expensive,” Gwen explained.

Gwen’s husband, Ronnie, set up a fundraiser in a bid to help his wife as alternative treatment is expensive.

"I look at my wife lying on the sofa day in and day out, with what I can only describe as broken-hearted,” he says. “I must look over at her a thousand times a day when I’m not doing my chores, ‘As Gwen calls them’, seeing her squeezing her eyes closed along with a constant frown on her face even when she’s asleep. Hearing the moans an groans while she’s holding her chest. It kills me that I cannot do anything, I feel so powerless.”

Ronnie added: “Cancer is eating her alive. Having gone through this, living in limbo for the last seven years. The not knowing, living her life from scan to scan every three months. Hoping and praying that it hasn’t spread. Gwen has tried every treatment available to her to date. The last treatment she was on was working for the type of cancer she was diagnosed with initially but now having developed another type of breast cancer nothing is working for that. You can actually see this cancer eating away at her. She has two huge holes where her breast used to be and every time I walk into the kitchen where she dresses her wound, the tears running down her face from the pain of trying to clean it. I walk back out hoping she hasn’t seen nor heard me, I stand in the hallway holding my hands on my head, looking up to heaven and cursing at God saying, ‘Why Gwen, why not me. If I could take it out of her body and put it into mine, I would’.”

You can donate to the fundraiser here.