Thank God October is almost over. If you believe all the media hype coming from those pink campaigns, you’d be convinced that in this day and age no one dies from breast cancer anymore…unless they simply didn’t take care of themselves. Sure, they lose their hair, they get chemo and radiation and then… they re-emerge from the darkness to live full and long lives.

These campaigns spotlight survivors everywhere, celebrating the end of their “cancer journeys”… living their lives with relief that they had “the strength and personal empowerment to beat cancer!”

That’s all complete crap.

Because the fact of the matter is, no one dies from breast cancer. They die from METASTATIC BREAST CANCER. And all those jubilant survivors? Thirty percent of them, no matter how clean they’ve lived their lives, thirty percent of them will be diagnosed again, maybe just months or maybe years later, with stage 4…metastatic breast cancer.

This cancer doesn’t care how old you are, what the color of your skin is, what language you speak, or what country you were born in, and it doesn’t care about the foods you eat (or don’t). It doesn’t care what gender or religion you are.

It doesn’t discriminate. Period. NO ONE is immune from getting breast cancer or even metastatic breast cancer. It’s all a complete crap shoot.

The five year survival rate of metastatic breast cancer? Just 22%. You don’t need to be a math whiz to know those odds stink.

Can YOU imagine? What would you change in your life if you were handed that diagnosis? Would you cut through the noise to insist on hearing the narrative?

Would you decide who does and does not bring joy to your life? Would you choose to take on new hobbies as you watch the old hobbies take a back seat to your disease? Would you be willing to take daily chemo pills and/or attach yourself to an IV every three weeks, like clockwork, that drips cancer-fighting drugs into your body in an effort to stop the charge of an insidious disease…the same disease that garners a paltry 7% of all dollars raised in an effort to ‘find the cure’? Nancy Pelosi would call that “breadcrumbs”. Of all the billions of dollars raised, funding towards research to find a cure for the only stage of breast cancer that kills gets measly breadcrumbs. Sounds like a very cruel trick to me…but well, hey.

Tomorrow I meet with my oncologist to discuss results of my recent scans. A nurse told me the scans looked great…BUT.   It seems there was something new… ground glass, seen on one of the CTs.

Huh? Is this a TRICK?  Ground glass isn’t a medical term I’m familiar with and although Google tells me what it often refers to, I’d like confirmation from my oncologist that, in my particular case, it’s nothing cancer-related.  It may in fact only be the ghost of my nagging cough that struggles to go away due to damage left in my lungs by radiation.

Yet, it still sort of feels like a TRICK…but I’m hoping not. Because I really want to do that happy dance…but not until I hear my doc declare that I’m STILL STABLE.

Please oh please oh please.   My TREAT? Godzilla #55 will be tee’d up for me tomorrow. #BringIt