Thank you for sticking with me this month! October tends to be a long month for those of us living with cancer. It's triggering, it brings up memories, it can cause consternation in the extreme. And yet, we survived another October. My purpose in sharing my story and the details of living with Stage IV … Continue reading October/Pinktober 2021, wrapping up →

As you consider how you will celebrate Halloween and the end of October, consider this number of men and women in the US who are no longer with us. This number is an average of the number of people we lose in the US all year, but the point is the same. While we get … Continue reading BCAM 2021: Day #31 and Happy Halloween →

I don't know the details of this survey like how the participants were found or the demographics, but I do know that the results are really frustrating. There are so many myths that have become so mainstream that it's hard to address them. So many people think that those of us who have MBC are … Continue reading BCAM 2021: Day #30 →

I've participated thus far in three different clinical trials. None of the clinical trials involved medication, but rather different ways of testing and interacting with different types of tissue. Sometimes I've participated by sending the paraffin blocks of tumor cells (also called "tumor blocks") and sometimes I've participated by having blood draws at various times … Continue reading BCAM 2021: Day #28 →

Living while dying is a hard thing. Learning to balance treatments and side effects and the struggle of being a forever patient with life can suck every bit of energy from our increasingly frail bodies. Our organs and bones and tissues can only withstand so much. And our doctors and the treatments take us close … Continue reading BCAM 2021: Day #27 →

I didn't know much about inflammatory breast cancer (IBC) until I started reading Anya Silver's poetry and was connected through her to Ginny Mason at the Inflammatory Breast Cancer Research Foundation. Besides the fact that Anya's poetry has touched my life in so many ways, I am grateful for the information and advocacy about IBC … Continue reading BCAM 2021: Day #26 →

Language matters and the words that people use are so important. Here's some words that are often misunderstood in this context: Cure: many people who have breast cancer are told they are cured when they are at the place where cancer cannot be visibly detected in imaging tests or on bloodwork after a breast cancer … Continue reading BCAM 2021: Day #25 →

When I was first diagnosed with breast cancer back in 2017, my surgeon drew diagrams very similar to the ones on this slide. She told me how having HER2 receptors used to be a really really bad thing, but that there was an amazing new medication that I could take if I had them. She … Continue reading BCAM 2021: Day #24 →

What does it mean to be hormone receptor positive? At a basic level, hormones that each of our bodies make naturally are fuel for the cancer. If there is estrogen or progesterone in high amounts in the body, then the cancer has more fuel to grow and spread. When the fuel is block and removed … Continue reading BCAM 2021: Day #23 →