More on Life After Breast Cancer

Beth Caldwell is another story about life after breast cancer. But the really sad kind. She was diagnosed with breast cancer at age 37, which is three years before she would have gotten a mammogram. Unfortunately she had a huge factor going against her with her diagnosis. She was diagnosed at stage IV.

This is a very bad thing. This is not the good painted pink breast cancer. This is the really bad kind. This is the cancer that something like 7% (or so, I can't remember the exact number) diagnosis that women (and men) face.

When you are diagnosed at stage IV, you are already past the point where everyone else is at and where everyone else is trying not to get to. Their treatment is trying to keep them from getting to Stage IV. Beth didn't have that luck.

Now Beth is gone. She passed away on All Souls Day, November 2, 2017, 3.5 years after diagnosis. That is a very short time. If I can do math, she was just over 40 years old. She left a husband and two children.

Before her diagnosis she was an attorney. She left her work and became a mom and a cancer patient. That's a sucky life. The cancer patient part. Not the mom part.

I don't claim to know Beth. I have read her blog a few times.... but not every update, but most of them. But I feel for her. I can relate.

So there can be millions of women with pink boas walking and running their events who say they are lucky to be 'survivors'. But the sad side of breast cancer is people like Beth. She didn't make it more than a few years.

You ask how breast cancer sucks? This is the ultimate suck. I hate breast cancer.

Sad phone call

This morning I had a call from a friend who is in my breast cancer circle, N. She called because another friend from the same circle, B, is in the hospital and being moved home in hospice care. We all knew this was coming. B has been slowly going down hill since being diagnosed with metastases in early 2013. It is sad.

We talked about another friend who died of breast cancer last year. At the time B told N that something about she knew she was next. The downside of having a network of breast cancer friends there are some who go to stage IV at and then eventually they slowly go. 

I know a lot of women who have breast, or another type of, cancer. They all understand what happens with cancer and its progression. Some I know in person, like B and N, others I may have met a time or too, like J who is one year out from a stage IV diagnosis after 15 years clean since her original diagnosis, and others who I only know online. However closely I know them or at what distance, we know these calls and emails happen.

It was a sad phone call this morning. I hope to visit B soon. N will tell me after she sees her today when she would be up for a visit. It is a sad situation which I know will be repeated again and again.It is sad but it is also part of the circle of life.