Driven by a profound commitment to community service and making a meaningful impact, Chhavi is passionate about leveraging her skills and experience to support non-profit initiatives, especially those focused on breast cancer awareness and support. Her journey with hormone-positive stage II breast cancer in 2023 has profoundly shaped her heartfelt personal commitment to this cause.

I grew up as the daughter of a mother who battled lymphoma for 10 grueling years, only to be taken away by leukemia in the end. As a teenager, I accompanied her through this harrowing journey, unaware that I was accumulating PTSD along the way. Health and wellness became my fixation, a supposed guarantee against cancer. But this obsession was rooted in fear – fear so profound that I avoided having children, terrified of subjecting them to the horrors I witnessed with my mother's treatments.

There was an abundance of promising new research that came out of the 2023 San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium. Here are some highlights for metastatic breast cancer. Be sure to check out our early-stage highlights.

CBCN had the pleasure of attending the San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium in December. Below you’ll find the latest research for early-stage breast cancer. Watch out for the latest research on mBC.

If you found out that you had a life-limiting illness, would you tell your colleagues at work? If you did, would they think you’re less capable of doing your job? That was the dilemma that Colleen Packer faced when she was diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer in 2019.

Trapped beneath my bra, cotton t-shirt and cropped pants, pools of sweat mingled with dust and grime before being absorbed into my clothes and skin. Despite the cold showers I soaped up under twice daily, one before heading out into the wee hours of the morning and another again in the dark of night before crawling under a thin sheet to sleep, the dirty damage was done. A skin fungus had formed. I had ringworm.

The 2023 American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) annual meeting was held from June 2 to 6. CBCN was pleased to be able to attend and participate in the many interesting and groundbreaking research that was shared at ASCO this year. Below, we present a few highlights and takeaways from this year’s conference.

Nothing can prepare you for the onslaught of side effects the tiny little hormone-blocking drug Tamoxifen can create in your body and your life. At least that’s how I feel…now. When my oncologist first handed me the five-year prescription for the 10-mg daily dose along with a pamphlet listing 40-odd side effects, I thought differently. Then, my oncologist explained how Tamoxifen works and what I may experience—including hot flashes, weight gain and irregular periods—in such an airy, breezy way that took, maybe, all of 45 seconds to share I figured, okay, I’ve got this. This’ll be no big deal. If there was anything to worry about my doctor would warn me. Thousands of women pop this pill every single day without complaint, I’ll be fine.

Joycelyn Merkley, from Shelburne, Ontario, describes herself as: a girlfriend, mother, grandmother, sister, and daughter. She has lived 53 years embracing these roles when in July of 2021 she was thrown into another role: breast cancer patient.

A breast cancer diagnosis comes with so many questions and there never seems to be enough time at appointments to have some of these questions answered. To help address this, we developed a "Q&E: Questions and Experts" series. In this series, a variety of experts spend the entire virtual session answering pre-submitted and live questions from participants. Watching the videos on-demand might be a little difficult to get through. So, we’ve created this guide to help you get right to the questions and answers that matter the most to you.

In today’s post, we provide the questions that were sent in and asked during the live session of our Questions and Experts session held in April 2021. In this session, Dr. Sandeep Sehdev, MD, FRCPC, a Medical Oncologist, answered questions about HR-positive breast cancer. In the parentheses, you’ll find the timestamp of where to find the question in the on-demand video.

Chances are, if you have breast cancer you’ve heard about Tamoxifen. I remember the first time my oncologist talked to me about the chemo-infused hormonal-therapy drug. It was during my weekly check-up when I was still having daily radiation. He explained that because the cancer cells found in my right breast were 95 per cent estrogen and progesterone receptor positive, my body’s natural hormones could attach to the cancer cells and help them grow. Obviously I didn’t want that, so I said yes to the drug without even hesitating.

I remember sitting in the small room waiting for the doctor to come in.  I was nervous but didn’t think anything was wrong.  The doctor came in and asked how I was.  I gave my usual cheery response that everything was good but added that “it depended on what he was going to tell me…ha ha ha”.  I laughed but my jovial manner quickly subsided when my doctor sat down and the words “it’s not good” came out.  My heart dropped.  He then said, “It’s cancer”.  My heart dropped again.

People have known about breast cancer since ancient times.  For most of that time, there were no effective treatments.  However, in the last 120 years, advances in surgical and medical treatments have meant that today, 98 percent of patients with localized breast cancer survive at least five years after diagnosis.  The following timeline shows the development of breast cancer treatments.

Every year clinicians, researchers, patient advocates and industry members head to Texas to share the latest breakthroughs in breast cancer research. It’s a key conference to learn about new treatments or new standards of care for breast cancer patients. Here’s some of the highlights that have the most impact on patient care today:

My life changed forever once I received the phone call no one wants to get early one morning in March 2015. My surgeon was on the other line with the results from my recent biopsy. The lump that was supposed to be only a pesky cyst was indeed cancerous. The surgeon further explained my diagnosis. But the only thing I heard was that I had cancer. My world felt like it was spinning out of control.

When the nurse phoned me at 8:30 a.m. on December 15, 2015 to ask if I could make it to the hospital the same day, I knew it was serious. Receiving confirmation that same morning that I had breast cancer was devastating.