SWANSBORO, N.C. (WITN) – One of the worst things you can hear when battling cancer is that medicine to help you in that fight has been backordered.

Unfortunately, that’s what lots of people across the country are hearing. It was the reality for a Swansboro woman who waited months for her prescription to be filled.

Linda Van Dyke is many things – a gardener, an ocean lover and a woman of faith. She’s also a lung cancer patient. Her journey started a decade ago.

“At the end of 2014, I got to where I could hardly walk. If I got to a squatted position, I could hardly stand back up, and I kept going to the local doctors and saying there’s something wrong, but they were like… no, it’s all in your head,” Van Dyke explained.

She eventually saw a doctor for a scan. He called her the next day to tell her there was a mass in her lung.

“St. Patrick’s day that year, I was laying on the table and they were cutting my lung out,” Van Dyke explained.

The diagnosis and treatment impacts the way she lives her life. Right now, Van Dyke takes Augtyro, a chemotherapy drug, but the side effects are rough.

“It depletes all the water in your body,” she explained. “So your bones and everything, it’s hurting.”

To help her with the pain and lack of appetite, her doctor also prescribed dronabinal back in February, but months later, she was still struggling to get it filled.

“She called the pharmacy every day for four months,” Van Dyke said. “I called the Walmart in Swansboro. I called the Duke Cancer Specialty Pharmacy because they could fill it because that’s where I go for my treatment, and they couldn’t fill it. But they all said they couldn’t get it. The suppliers don’t have any.”

Finally in June, she found out it was ready.

“It doesn’t take the pain away, but it helps get a little more manageable,” Van Dyke said.

Sarah Miller is a pharmacist at Pharmville Drug in Farmville. She says dronabinal has been on backorder for the two years she’s worked in the business.

“We’ve had a few prescriptions come in every now and then, but as of my time as a pharmacist, I haven’t been able to dispense it,” Miller explained.

Miller she says there are a lot of factors that can make a medication be backordered.

“Sometimes it could be there is an ingredient in there that’s on shortage, that is making the medication on shortage, or maybe they’re having to go through some purity testing which is making the manufacturer have to hold up their manufacturing of the medication, but typically we don’t get a real explanation,” she said.

Duke Gynecologic Oncologist Angeles Alvarez Secord has worked alongside other oncology experts to help doctors navigate shortages and to advocate for change.

“The last thing you want your patient to be dealing with is the stress of not being able to get access to these drugs that are potentially life-saving,” she said. They even did a survey to see how many doctors were impacted.

“It was quickly apparent that in over 30 states, our colleagues were experiencing drug shortages that were impacting treatments for their patients. So that’s how this really launched,” she explained.

She and other members of the Society for Gynecologic Oncology even took their concerns to a Congressional level. Dr. Secord says it’s a tough problem to solve because of the amount of factors that can cause shortages.

“It’s essentially like a house of cards. You’re getting raw materials from places outside the United States, predominantly from China, then developing these active pharmaceutical ingredients and again – predominantly ex-U.S. countries,” Dr. Secord said. “And so, we’re reliant on those, and we can’t always assure quality control. The FDA does go out and visit these sites, so if there’s quality-control issues, that can cause a breakdown of the supply chain.”

On top of that, when drugs are generic and less expensive, Dr. Secord says that can decrease the profit incentive for manufacturers.

“And then there’s all sorts of problems in terms of how these drugs are purchased,” Dr. Secord added. “Whether it’s directly through the manufacturer or through the middle buyers. There are elements in terms of the cost, how you buy these drugs or whether you buy in bulk. It’s really complicated. There’s not one way to fix this. It’s really going to take a multi-pronged approach.”

Dr. Secord continued to say that it will take change on a federal level.

“Until our representatives in Congress put some real legislation behind this, I don’t think it will be solved. It’s not a simple ‘The FDA should take care of this.’ They don’t have the ability to do that. This is on so many levels a system that is broken. It’s no longer working.”

For Van Dyke – she’s grateful that she’s no longer waiting for her dronabinal prescription to be filled, but she worries for those who are and hopes efforts like Dr. Secord’s continue so that no one has to wait for a drug that has such a significant impact on her life.

“It’s just unacceptable,” said Van Dyke.

In 2020, then-president Donald Trump issued an executive order that identified a list of what were considered “essential” medications for the government to stockpile to avoid shortages. But neither of Van Dyke medications are on there.

Dr. Secord says the best way for all of us to help fight drug shortages is advocacy. You can start by talking to your legislators about the importance of addressing shortages of oncology drugs and all drugs.