Ellen Datlow reports that Australian writer Paul Haines is battling cancer. While surgery and chemotherapy seemed to have done the job with the bowel cancer, his directly recently discovered spots on his liver. Haines is writing about his battle on his blog. One of the current struggles is that his doctor wants to “wait a couple of months to see how the cancer in my liver is behaving. He also understands our fear, our need, to not be sitting around waiting to do nothing. So in those couple of months we will try the other two forms of chemotherapy for cancers like I have and to combine that with a monoclonal anitbody called Avastin. Chemo fights the tumour, the antibody fights the blood vessels feeding the tumour. Unfortunately, Avastin is not part of Medicare or the private health system’s funding at this stage, so we’re having to come up with $20,000 to do it.”
Several of his friends have set up methods of donation to help pay for the treatment. For a link to the PayPal donation system, see this post.
Haines‘s short fiction collection Doorways for the Dispossessed was published by Prime Books in 2006.