Aussie cancer sufferer crowdfunds $13k to play songs for the dying

Cancer sufferer Michal Wright will be learning to use music to help the dying. But it's going to cost her $70,000. Source: Supplied

MICHAL Wright knows more about dying than most. A cancer sufferer, you'd think the last thing she'd want to do is devote her life to playing music for terminally ill people.

This remarkable 29-year-old from Kuranda in Far North Queensland has been facing her own cancer battle for the past seven years, diagnosed with acute thyroid cancer, which spread rapidly to her lymph glands and both of her lungs. Surgery and radiation have kept her alive, and the prognosis is good, despite the fact that she is still living with cancer cells in her lungs.

But poor health has not stopped the former refugee support worker and graphic designer from devoting her life to playing songs for the dying, on her harp.

The therapy is a certified medical practice known as Music Thanatology - the practice of using music and voice to aid in peaceful passings.

Michal now wants to expand her work, and is looking to enrol in a two year training course in the United States.

To realise her dream, she has raised more than $13,000 on crowdfunding website Pozible.

"It's not about playing peoples favourite tunes or lovely relaxation music," Wright wrote on her Pozible page. "Music-Thanatologists are trained to use music in a very particular way, continually responding to each persons needs.

"The music is offered to bring emotional comfort, help to relieve physical pain and assist with breathing difficulties but the heart of the offering is to bring about a deep sense of peace in often difficult and trying circumstances."

And if anyone were familiar with 'trying circumstances', Wright would be it.

"Before I was diagnosed with cancer I had stopped doing a lot of things," Wright told news.com.au.

"I had given up playing piano, and some other things. Being diagnosed made me start to think about those things, about what I should have been doing that I hadn't been doing.

"Music was one of those things that came out really strongly for me".

Wright said that until last week she has had a very private relationship with the harp. She had been playing the harp for her own feeling had no desire to perform for crowds.

"That's what draws me to other people, in more intimate spaces than up on stage," she says.

"As a society we isolate people who are dying."

"For me and my experience being diagnosed with cancer, a lot of people want to take your suffering and pain away but sometimes that isolates you and you feel like you can't express yourself comfortably.

"If I can sit with someone who is suffering and comfort them and offer them some peace, I'd love to be able to do that.

"That is the biggest aspect that calls me to this work."

Wright launched the crowd funding campaign last Wednesday, and within hours she had raised $2000 of her $10,000 goal.

By the next morning she had raised $9,500.

"If you spoke to my house mate when I was about to post it online, I was an anxious mess," Wright said. "I can't explain. I've never been so nervous in my life, putting my story out there, asking for people's support.

"I don't come from a family with money so asking for financial assistance is quite an uncomfortable experience."

"It turned out to be most wonderful experience of my life. I am totally overwhelmed. I'm still in shock."

Wright called the reaction to her campaign "a blessing" and said she lacked faith that people would get behind her.

"I'm getting confirmation from the amount of people that support me that I'm on the right path," she said.

Though she set the campaign target at $10,000, Wright is looking at a bill of $70,000 for the next two years, thanks in part to US visa requirements.

In order to qualify for a study visa, Wright must study two degrees. She has elected to study a certificate of end of life care to compliment her Music Thanatology course.

But it's going to cost at least $9,000 in fees.

She is also only allowed to work 20 hours a week under her visa conditions.

"I'm going to be busy" Wright said. "I'm not sure how I'm going to manage that and two full time study loads. Of course I have my health to worry about as well, stress is a pretty big factor. The more support I can get the better.

"If I could just focus on my studies, that would be so amazing, to take away that financial burden."

Stress is an aspect that Wright will have to take very seriously. Studying end of life care is distressing for even the most healthy person, but for a cancer sufferer the risks are even greater.

For the sake of her health, Wright will have to learn how to keep her emotions under control.

"I think it's probably going to be really confronting," she said. "The course prepares you for that and teaches you how to be with people who are dying.

"I'm going to have to spend a lot of time reflecting and managing my own emotions. I have an incurable disease myself, (so) sitting with someone dying of cancer could be really challenging for me and I don't want to bring my own anxieties to that. So the next few years will be quite confronting, and I'm going to have to do a lot of inner work to come to terms with my own illness and learn how to offer my own calming presence at the bed side."

You can donate to Michal's study needs by visiting her Pozible page and clicking on the donate button.

Continue the conversation via Twitter| @ClaireRPorter | @newscomauHQ

Here are some of the best crowd funding campaigns around:

1. App camp for girls

The campaign aims to address the gender imbalance amongst app and computer developers by giving girls the opportunity to learn how to build apps and be inspired by other women in the industry in a non-threatening environment.

The campaign aimed to raise $50,000. It has already far exceeded its target and has so far raised $74,348. Better yet, there are still nine days to go before the campaign closes.

Click here to donate.

2. Save Chappelow Dance

A dance program in San Francisco has lost its funding, meaning that many of the hundreds of children who attend won't have anywhere to go after school.

Save Chappelow Dance V1 from Andrea Leggett on Vimeo.

The program was designed to encourage school attendance and positive social interaction. The unemployment rate is high in the area and many of the families cannot afford proper meals. About 62 per cent of students get lunch subsidies. Without this dance program, its founders worry children may stop attending school altogether.

The program has so far raised only $921 of is $45,000 goal.

Click here to donate.

3. Smart Saturdays

This campaign aims to provide educational proficiency programs for African American boys between third and fifth grade living in California.

"Too many young men of colour find themselves on the fringes of American society simply because they lacked solid educational foundations," it reads on the campaign's website. "UEA changes this paradigm by ensuring that boys of colour begin cultivating the academic and critical social/emotional competencies required to do well in school, their careers, and life."

Click here to donate.

4. The Oatmeal vs Funny Junk

The owner of aggregator website, Funny Junk threatened to sue famous web comic artist, Matthew Inman for $20,000 if he did not remove statements from hugely successful website The Oatmeal alleging that FunnyJunk’s comics were "being stolen, re-hosted, and monetised on FunnyJunk's website."

So Inman turned to crowdfunding website IndieGogo to raise $20,000, not for the lawsuit but to donate to the National Wildlife Federation and the American Cancer Society. Twenty-thousand dollars is a small price to pay to humiliate your opponent.

The campaign worked and Inman ended up raising $220,000.

To rub salt on the wound Inman withdrew every single dollar raised from his bank account and photographed the money stacked in small piles that form slightly naughty words.