What do you think of when you hear Stage IV cancer?
By Jaime
May 14, 2010
What do you think of when you hear Stage IV cancer, or metastatic cancer? Granted, with each type of cancer, the specific statistics change, but with many, if not most cancers, Stage IV brings a kind of dread. A fear of the unknown, at being at the end of one side of the spectrum. Even for those working in oncology, Stage IV cancer may bring a feeling of….fear, or powerlessness….after all, we’re here to destroy cancer, right? Well, maybe not. I’ve written before about living with cancer, as millions of people in America are doing every day. Cancer has shifted and continues to be a chronic disease, like diabetes, rather than a death sentence. No where has this been more apparent to me than in Stage IV cancers. Katherine Russell Rich’s article in the New York Times a few weeks ago described life as a 17-year metastatic breast cancer survivor. Now, while she is the rare case (average survival of Stage IV breast cancer is 30 months), she exists.
| Death is a part of life, Stage IV cancer is part of living… |
On the eve of Mother’s Day, I was talking to a woman whose breast cancer came back after 17 years of remission, this time in her sternum. With radiation and hormone therapy, the cancer is under control, but she talks freely about her reality. She works in the cancer field and is well aware of the statistics. She talks about the shock at seeing the words “metastatic breast cancer” on the top of the script for her PET scan, despite the fact that she knows her diagnosis and prognosis. She describes the fear she has when her chest is sore after lifting weights, the thought that the cancer may be back. But she also knows that it’s about working with the cancer to control it so that she has quality of life and can enjoy her children, her husband, and her art.
This woman has forced me to reevaluate my own assumptions about Stage IV cancer. Yes, Stage IV breast cancer can look quite different than Stage IV ovarian cancer, or Stage IV Hodgkin disease. But she is living with Stage IV disease, with death in the picture, but as she pointed out, death is a part of everyone’s life.
Rather than ignore and tiptoe around the topic, we talk about our fear and anxiety about it, and her strength comes from her willingness to be vulnerable in this regard. It’s when the disease and the possibility of death is ignored and not talked about that valuable time is wasted; time that could be spent talking about love and life and things you want to say to each other. It’s not being morbid, it’s not being pessimistic. Death is a part of life, Stage IV cancer is part of living, and dying is a part of both disease and health. Ironically, it is from those with Stage IV cancer that I have learned the most about living.
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