A woman, who described herself as “fit and healthy,” visited an optician for a routine eye exam and soon after received a shocking diagnosis.

Anne Haslam, a 63-year-old mountaineering and cycling enthusiast from Derbyshire, U.K., had not noticed any symptoms before her optician referred her to Royal Hallamshire Hospital in Sheffield for further testing in late 2022, according to the BBC.

A scan revealed a tumor in her left eye, and Haslam was then diagnosed with ocular uveal melanoma, a rare type of cancer that “affects the uvea, the middle layer of the eye that contains blood vessels, pigment cells (melanocytes) and provides nutrients and oxygen to the retina,” per the Melanoma Research Alliance.

About 850 cases of eye cancer are diagnosed in the U.K. each year, the BBC reported.

“Initially, it was a shock because I was fit and healthy as far as I was concerned,” Haslam said of her diagnosis. “Since then, it has been quite hard because you go to different centers as part of the process. There isn’t one person looking after you. You have to be your own advocate and look at what treatments are available, and that is hard.”

Haslam’s left eye was successfully treated, and she later underwent surgery to remove a tumor found in her liver. However, scans done at the end of last year showed that additional tumors had developed.

Because her type of cancer is so rare, there are limited treatment options available. The Ocular Melanoma UK charity advised Haslam to discuss chemosaturation with her medical team. The specialist treatment is not available through the U.K.’s National Health Service (NHS), so Haslam’s family is currently fundraising to access the treatment privately.

“The only time I’ve had some hope has been this chemosaturation because the results of that potentially could extend my life. Without that, what they were saying was 18 months,” Haslam said, per the BBC.

“It’s hard,” she continued. “I have a very strong family. I’ve got two children and a new granddaughter, and not seeing my grandchildren grow up makes me sad. And that is the likely outcome.”

Chemosaturation is a non-surgical treatment for cancer of the liver that involves “temporarily isolating the liver from the body’s blood circulation and delivering a highly concentrated dose of an anti-cancer drug (melphalan) directly to the liver, thereby ‘saturating’ the entire organ,” per Chemosaturation.co.uk. Because the drug is delivered to the entire liver, it can potentially treat undetected microtumors in addition to visible tumors.

According to a GoFundMe set up by Haslam’s family, the 63-year-old will need four rounds of chemosaturation treatment, with each costing “in excess” of $54,000. Haslam has already undergone two rounds, and her family said their goal is to raise a total of about $175,000 to ensure she “can access other treatment rounds.”

“Should other promising treatment options become available for Anne, this fundraising will also help support those opportunities,” the family wrote on the fundraising page, describing Haslam as a “much-loved wife, mom, daughter, sister, grandma, auntie and friend.”