A no-nonsense Texan of 60 years, Jody Schoger has a very no-nonsense way of educating people about her metastatic breast cancer.“Someone will say, ‘When are you done with treatment?’ and I’ll tell them, ‘When I’m dead,’” said Schoger, a writer and cancer advocate who lives near Houston. “So many people interpret survivorship as going across the board. That everybody survives cancer now. But everybody does not survive cancer.”An estimated 155,000 plus women (and men) in the U.S. currently live with “mets,” Stage 4 breast cancer that’s traveled through the bloodstream to create tumors in the liver, lungs, brain, bones and/or other parts of the body. While treatable, metastatic breast cancer (MBC) is incurable. Between 20 and 30 percent of women with early stage breast cancer go on to develop MBC. Median survival is three years; annually, the disease takes 40,000 lives. As with primary breast cancer, treatment for mets can often be harsh and unforgiving. But dealing with an incurable illness and the side effects of its treatment aren’t the only burden MBC patients have to bear. Many also have to educate others about their disease, explaining over and over that no, the scans and blood tests and treatments will never come to end. No, the metastasized breast cancer in their lungs is neither lung cancer nor linked to smoking. No, staying positive and “just fighting hard” isn’t going to beat back their late stage disease.As one mets patient in this Living Beyond Breast Cancer video put it, “It’s almost like having another job … My wish would be that the larger support circle would just get it more.”A disease no one ‘gets’Sadly, people don’t “get” mets. In fact, a recent survey sponsored by Pfizer Oncology shows just how misunderstood it is. Sixty percent of the 2,000 people surveyed knew little to nothing about MBC while 72 percent believed advanced breast cancer was curable as long as it was diagnosed early. Even more disheartening, a full 50 percent thought breast cancer progressed because patients either didn’t take the right treatment or the right preventative measures.“They’ve built an industry built on four words – early detection equals cure -- and that doesn’t even begin to define breast cancer,” said Schoger, who helped found Breast Cancer Social Media, a virtual community for breast cancer survivors, surgeons, oncologists and others. “Women are blamed for the fate of bad biology.”The MBC Alliance, a consortium of 29 cancer organizations including the biggest names in breast cancer (think Avon, Komen, Susan Love, etc.), addressed this lack of understanding and support as well as what many patient advocates term the underfunding of MBC research in a recently published landmark report. “The dominance of the ‘breast cancer survivor’ identity masks the reality that patients treated for early stage breast cancer can experience metastatic recurrence … [anywhere from] a few months [to] 20 years or more after initial diagnosis,” the report states. “Public messaging about the ‘cure’ and survivorship is so pervasive that people diagnosed at Stage 4 with MBC can be stigmatized by the perception that they’ve failed to take care of themselves or undergo annual screening.”‘You end up on Mars’[...]
Posted on: Sat, 25 Oct 2014 12:17:36 +0000