Catching up on some MBC BCAM awareness!

Each October, Metavivor shares tiles of educational information and 2025 is no different. I’ll be sharing information throughout the month as I have the time/bandwidth and today I’m catching up on the first week of tiles:

Approximately 117 people in the United States die every day from Stage IV Metastatic Breast Cancer (MBC) — that’s the equivalent of a plane load of people falling out of the sky to their deaths every single day. For those of us who learn our friends enter hospice regularly, are attending funerals regularly, who watch the decline of bright amazing people on a daily basis, it feels pretty darn urgent.

And here’s another level of urgency — the rate of diagnosis of every age group of people diagnosed with breast cancer is declining in the United States EXCEPT for women diagnosed under 40, likely to be pre-menopausal, and that age group is more likely to die quickly for a variety of reasons.

In 2017, we discovered that the cancer cells left my breast and took up residence in my bones; and just about every single bone in my body was affected. It wasn’t until 2022 that lesions were discovered in my liver, but those lesions in my bones and in my liver (past and present) are still breast cancer.

I was in that 6% of people who are diagnosed de novo, but the majority of people living with MBC had a previous early stage diagnosis. While people with MBC aren’t counted as well as we could be, all of the data collected by the SEER database, among others, support this statistic that 30% of people diagnosed with early stage breast cancer (stages 0, I, II, and III) progress to Stage IV. People need to know their specific individual risk, not just the overall population risk of developing breast cancer at any stage.

Cancer is not one disease. Breast Cancer is not one disease. Metastatic Breast Cancer is not one disease. Seeking a cure is a valuable goal and one that I hope many researchers are working towards; at the same time, understanding that there will have to be many cures to solve the problem of breast cancer has been a shift I’ve had to make since my own diagnosis. Be aware of this when you consider where you donate funds this October or at any time.

When I tell people that I’ve been in constant active treatment for breast cancer for over eight (8) years, I often get odd looks. It is daunting to think about the trajectory of one’s life and see how the time available will be affected differently and when you are dependent on the availability of specialized medication, your perspective shifts yet again. Those of us who are only alive so long as there are treatments available have to adjust how we view the world and research and so many things.

Follow Metavivor for more information and stay tuned for more educational moments during BCAM — for now, I’ll leave you with this — when you are asked to donate towards research in October or any other month, ask questions about where the money is going. If your desire is to impact the possibility of a cure for breast cancer, don’t donate to general funds, but ask if the funds you are donating could be targeted or allocated to what is important to you. In other words, think before you pink.