Metastatic Breast Cancer and My Life

(23) Time has marched on and I have now absorbed Metastatic Breast Cancer (MBC) into my life as though it's just a part of who I am.  I am no longer shocked, overwhelmed or even overly bothered by having this disease.  I'm not sure whether this is due to my innate personality or whether it's a normal phase once the shock value of the disease has worn off and life has settled into some sort of routine which encompasses it, but it does seem to me that MBC and I are at peace with each other.  We are no longer in competition with each other and I accept it as a lifestyle matter. I have always looked at life differently from the way most other people seem to,  so I should have expected this, I guess.  I constantly see articles headed "My Fight With Breast Cancer", "Breast Cancer Warrior" and  similar analogies with a warlike state.  This isn't how I see it at all. I don't see myself in "the fight of my life",  as I've also seen it ...

(22) This is the way I see my Stage IV breast cancer now.  There comes a time when you have to take stock of what has happened to your life and how you want to view it.  I feel that I'm extremely fortunate that my disease spread to my bones and not to organs because I've been told that bones contain the tumour for longer, which is a bonus.  What isn't a bonus is that metastases to the bones are extremely painful; unbearably so, and it's impossible to carry on with normal life with the degree of pain that tumours in the spine generate, once they've caused nerve damage especially.  The bones might contain it but, in doing so, they are stretched almost to breaking point, depending on how large the tumours are and this causes stress fractures.  My metastases are in my skull, neck, shoulders, sternum, ribs, spine in several places, hips and one femur and is referred to as extensive and widespread.  Now that I've been taking Letrozole for two years and have ha...

(21) In a month's time it will be two years since my diagnosis.  Two years!  It seems almost unbelievable that time could race by so quickly but it has.  This seems like a good time to think about my progress, both physically and emotionally. Starting with physically, because it's easy to summarise, the treatment is still controlling the cancer; only just but it is controlling it.  I've had regular three monthly CT scans and bone scans with the occasional extra bone scan thrown in if we're concerned and every time the bone scans are reported as stable, which means that the tumours are no better but they're no worse.  Every time I'm told that I sigh a sigh of relief because when you have MBC "stable" is good news.  There has been no new growth in the tumours, there is no new activity and there are no new tumours; everything is just as it was the last time and the time before that going right back to my operation.  The CT scans have all been report...

(20) If you have a friend or loved one who has been diagnosed with Stage IV breast cancer and you lack confidence on how best to help, I've attempted to put together some ideas, based on my own experience and on articles I've read.  One article I read was written by a woman who has breast cancer but at an earlier stage.   She understood that there's a world of difference between having breast cancer at an early stage and breast cancer at an advanced stage.  You could almost say they are two different diseases.    This is what she wrote but I've taken some liberties and have changed some parts of it to reflect the Australian situation: "Lacking a map of how best to help friends with late stage disease, I've decided to simply ask. So, recently I've spent a lot of time talking to women with MBC, asking how I -- an early stager -- can support & advocate for women in the breast cancer community who have been diagnosed Stage IV. The women I talked to wer...

(19) Don't be misled by the title of this post because this isn't the usual "if only", self pitying post that you might expect it to be.  It's me looking back and understanding what happened and why I now find myself with Stage IV breast cancer. This cancer was not caused by lifestyle.  I did absolutely nothing to cause it.  It wasn't caused by diet because the cancer cells were fed by oestrogen, over which I had absolutely no control.  It's a purely involuntary production of hormone that the body secretes more in some women than others.  It wasn't caused by a lack of exercise.  I've always loved exercise and been fit and active.  It wasn't caused by obesity because I've always been very slim, to the point that people have always told me I need to eat more.  It wasn't caused by negligence on my part.  I went for the two yearly mammograms that were recommended to me.  It wasn't caused by a lack of awareness of a lump because ...

(18) Twenty months after diagnosis and eighteen months since treatment began life is settling into a routine.  Pain and limitation of mobility, inability to go out and have fun and needing to be dependent on others have all become a way of life for me now.  Not a way of life I would choose - most definitely not, but it's what I've been reduced to, unfortunately. Notwithstanding the above, the biggest challenge to work on overcoming is the monotony of life and the lack of spontaneity as everything I do has to be planned carefully first.  This takes a toll on my mental resources and those of my wonderful husband and son as they try their hardest to keep me from sliding down the slippery slope into depression.  I'm not the sort of person who easily becomes depressed, no matter the circumstances, but when a person is reduced to a social life consisting solely of visits to the pathology lab and cancer centre, it takes a lot of strength and inner resources to constant...