October 6: Milestones

Mothers often think about seeing their child's "firsts" - First day of first grade, prom, graduation, wedding. For many, these are contemplated with the outlook that it's a given they'll be there.

Many young women with metastatic disease are mothers. For them, these milestones come with an extra prayer. They'd like to live long enough to see them. To see their young child start their first day of first grade, starting high school, going to a prom, off to college, getting married. For many of them, the reality is that they won't be able to live to see these things.

The ones they do experience, they're all the more precious for it.

What would it be like to have to live your life knowing that you probably won't survive long enough to see your little child start high school, let alone graduate or go to college? Knowing that this beast will rob you of these experiences, these milestones?

That's what it's like to live with Metastatic Breast Cancer. Even if you're stable now, each holiday, each birthday, it might be the last.

I recall one woman in a Facebook group for metastatic breast cancer. She went on a camping holiday with her husband and children to build memories for them over Mother's Day weekend, and during this time, she posts to the group with reports of feeling worse, with her eyes turning yellow. A week later, we learned that we lost her. That's how quickly things can change.

Each moment is precious, borrowed against the threat of the beast. We live knowing full well that we're dying.

It's not romantic. It's not Hollywood. It's not something beautiful and poignant and touching. It's rough and it's painful and it's unfair.

We are living on borrowed time, and there's too many milestones to live. Too many that are being robbed from us for lack of treatment. Effective treatment that can keep this beast at bay longer. Cancer is a living thing, it grows, and it adapts. Treatments which worked for years can suddenly become no longer effective, and there is progression. In the end, there is always progression. And there's not enough research for more treatments, more options when we run out of what's currently at hand. We turn to clinical trials and pray we don't get a placebo, pray that it works, in an effort to make it to the next milestone.

That's the reality of metastatic breast cancer.