What People Don’t Understand About My Life With MBC
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Rethink is honoured to be the guest editor for Wildfire Magazine’s MBC: Young and Stage IV October issue, which is dedicated to highlighting the voices of those with Metastatic Breast Cancer. Here is Sarah’s story.
As someone who was diagnosed Stage 4 from the start (de novo), I am happy to say that, today, I’m cancer-free. But, that doesn’t mean I’m treatment-free, scan-free, appointment-free, or worry-free. Once I finished active treatment and was able to declare my NED status, everyone in my life assumed that because I was done with chemo and radiation, I was also done with cancer. But the truth is, you’re never really “done” with cancer.
Every three weeks, I have to return to the chemo unit to receive targeted therapy to prevent my cancer from coming back. And just like that, I’m reminded all over again of everything I’ve been through. The smells, the needles, the looks of pity in the waiting room. It’s a constant reminder that I can never really leave cancer in the past. And the reminders don’t stop there. I also still receive monthly injections to keep my body in chemical menopause, and I’ll need to do hormone therapy for the next 5-10 years.
Each needle and pill are a reminder of how fragile life really is. That everything could all come crashing down around me without warning. But you can’t live life thinking like that; otherwise, you’d probably never leave the house! So I try my best to resume life as “normal”, or at least as best as I can. I live in the present moment as much as possible and I try to plan for the future. Sometimes it feels like being a patient is a full-time job and trying to figure out how other things fit into that (like my real job, for example) can definitely be tricky. I’m sure that with time, I’ll get better at balancing real life with cancer life (because real life is so worth it). – By Sarah