My 7th Metaversary

March 8, 2017, I received my breast cancer diagnosis and on June 27, 2017, I was told that I had actually been Stage IV from the beginning (aka de novo). I’ve marked the former as my cancerversary for the last seven years (check out the post I wrote in March about that 7th cancerversary here) and yet the latter needs some sort of acknowledgement. It was the latter diagnosis that has literally upended my life while we were still struggling to assimilate the idea of cancer.

That day, a Thursday and the day before my second AC infusion, is irrevocably seared into my memory. The call, early in the day, that I needed to come in, didn’t matter the time, just come didn’t immediately hit me as so important. I was in the middle of prepping for a hearing and couldn’t just drop that, so I prepped, went to the hearing and then went to my doctor’s office. Elliot insisted on coming with me, he intuitively knew it was bad. I was in denial and initially told him not to come, that he’d already missed too much work due to my medical appointments and surgeries but I am forever grateful he didn’t listen.

When my first medical oncologist (he retired in late 2017) gave me the news that I’d actually been Stage IV for a while, it was paralyzing. My ability to think just stopped and all I could visualize was my kids. I’m sure my doctor gave us some details, but the main detail I remember from the conversation was when he mentioned 10 years as a potential life span. I seized on that comment and asked some clarifying questions. My doctor immediately stopped me and said that 10 years was considered an outlier and that the life expectancy was closer to 2. He talked up the progress made with chemotherapeutic drugs in recent years and was kind and gentle. The very features that I didn’t like in him initially, because it felt paternalistic then, were the very things that I appreciated the most at the time of him delivering such devastating news. He was clear and he didn’t didn’t give me false hope — he said, before cancer was to be a chapter in your story, now cancer will end your life.

I wish I had some words of wisdom gathered from this experience, from being forced to face my own mortality over and over, day by day. The truth is, it’s all exhausting, draining, heavy. I hope I’ve gotten a little better at carrying it after all this time but it also feels as though I’m still at the beginning. It’s a strange and unsettling feeling to not feel as though I can move forward, to be continuously pulled back to the unshakable reality that I am living with, coexisting with, rogue cells that will eventually end my life.

So here I am, on my 7th line of treatment, and I’ve been knowingly living with Stage IV metastatic breast cancer for over 7 years. I’m sure the actual time I’ve had cancer has been longer than 7 years because back in June of 2017, I learned that the cancer lesions were in literally every bone. It took some time for that to happen and I’d been feeling pain for months, especially in my right femur, the area where a 5 cm tumor had put down roots.

There are things I know now that sometimes I wish I knew then. Cancer has legitimately changed everything and has taken a great deal away. It is not an easy thing to live with. And yet there is still magic, there are still memories to be made and I’m alive today.  Sometimes that’s all there is to hold onto.