Woman Puts Future Rights To Uterus Up For Auction To Help Friend With Cancer
Chemotheraphy is emotional and painful and oftentimes a financial strain on a person's life and well-being. One woman, though, is not letting costs get in the way of helping her friend, going so far as to sell the rights to her uterus.
April Creed, 42, from Coniston, Australia, is selling the future rights of her "duck nut of feminine wonder," as she puts it in her eBay ad, as part of a crowd-funding campaign she started to help pay for a chemotherapy drug to help her friend, Ann Truscott. Truscott, who was diagnosed years ago with breast cancer, works four days a week to pay for treatment but still cannot afford the drug, Kadcyla, which pharmaceutical company Roche agreed to discount for her from $93,000 to $15,000 under compassionate reasoning. Her cancer is now terminal, having spread to her bones and brain, according to the campaign.
"I sat down and thought, 'Oh my God, this is hideous,'" Creed told the Illawara Mercury. "I cried and didn't know what to do ... so I started the crowd-funding page two days later and it literally went up a grand a day — it just took off."
The campaign has already raised over $17,000 (US $14,866.06) in the last two weeks with the intended goal at $25,000 (US $21,861.88). Creed says on eBay that the buyer will receive the organ once she has died or undergone a hysterectomy along with a handwritten note that validates whomever purchases it as the owner.
"Probably on a paper towel … I'm a busy girl" she wrote in the ad, adding quirky tips on how it would make for a useful necessity.
"You could frame it, serve party nibbles in it," she said in the ad. "I reckon it would serve well as one of those enjo-type cleaning mits. Imagine your partner's face when they unwrap it at Christmas. Scratch that. Give it to your mother in law <3 ( Oh darling you shouldn't have!). I think it would also make a quirky mobile phone holder."
Creed originally came up with the idea to sell her uterus when she joked about selling it on the black market. Ebay, as she points out in her ad, prohibits the selling of body parts, so it gave her the idea to sell the rights instead. Her ad humorously warns that the organ in question has been "around the block a few times," having been on many exciting adventures that range from running for mayor to "getting plastered" and then attempting to break into an IKEA store.
"The girl has lived," she joked in the ad.
Truscott and her family poured much of their finances into getting her treatment. The situation was further complicated when her husband was forced to retire early after being diagnosed last Christmas with pancreatic cancer. She told the Illawara Mercury that "everyone deserves an April" in their lives.
"I haven't got the words for it. ...When you've hit the brick wall, you think, 'What in the hell am I going to do now? ...What a fabulous person she is.'"
Their item is listed on eBay with a starting bid of 2,500 Australian dollars.