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The Voice of People With Breast Cancer

Education

Our Voices Blog


Tag : recurrence

Can You Prevent a Breast Cancer Recurrence? No. But There Are Six Steps You Can Take That Can Help

Man, I’d be rich if I was a scientist and discovered a way to prevent a breast cancer recurrence. But I’m not. Instead, I’m a normal woman who is often riddled with worry that I’ll one day have one. I’m not thinking about this 24/7, but I am thinking about a potential recurrence often enough that the thought is a constant in my life, lurking in the back of my brain. It’s normal, I had breast cancer, I could have it again. These nagging thoughts always seem to resurface and escalate right before I’m scheduled to see my doctors for a mammogram or ultra-sound screening. And so, because I’ve been counting down the days until my next breast cancer-screening appointment, I’m having them now.

Reason #4 That Cancer Still Sucks: Surgery Can’t Prevent Recurrence

 In this blog series, we present excerpts from Dr. David Stewart’s book A Short Primer on Why Cancer Still Sucks. The fourth reason that cancer still sucks is that it can recur in some patients even if it appears to have been removed completely by surgery. Surgery is not even an option for many patients. 

Losses from mBC: Vision and Fertility

Five years ago, 2017, I had what I thought would be my last CT scan at the BC Cancer Agency. I was done. I busted out of there as if I was free, even though I had a mild concern about a weird, ongoing burp and GERD symptom. I was told this was anxiety and waited for the results thinking I would graduate from cancer world. This was the assumption from my medical team and something I thought could be true since it had been five and a half years since my early-stage diagnosis. Even though the fear of recurrence existed, I held strong like my oncologist did.

Breast Cancer Awareness is About More Than Pink Ribbons

Breast cancer awareness is about more than pink ribbons. Yes, we said it! It’s more than telling the world that breast cancer merely exists. We all undoubtedly know that it exists, and we likely all know someone touched by breast cancer. And yet, time and again, we hear patients say, “I wish I had known.” Because there is so much about breast cancer that goes unspoken.

Feeling the Fear and Releasing It

Do you ever think that you have another tumour? I don’t mean a recurrence with a breast cancer lesion, but a secondary cancer. And if you do, do these dark thoughts catch you by surprise in random pockets of moments, like when you feel an ache in your shoulder, or a knotted muscle along your spine, or when you take a deep breath and experience a sharpness of pain before you fully exhale? When this happens, do you immediately think, “fuck, I have a tumour,” and then have to talk yourself down from this mental, paranoid ledge? I do.

Living with inflammatory breast cancer

In August 2014 I found a lump in my left breast. This is unusual for inflammatory breast cancer (IBC), a rare and very aggressive cancer where cancer blocks the lymph vessels.

Triple-negative breast cancer: managing the fear of recurrence

“Abject terror floating in the back of my head.” That’s how Shelley Moore of St. Albert, Alberta describes her reaction to her 2014 diagnosis of Stage II triple negative breast cancer.

How I regained control of my life when breast cancer made me feel like I had lost it

My journey began on New Year’s Eve 2015, when I noticed a red mark on my right breast.  It wasn’t long before my stomach dropped and I felt my face flush while my throat did that swallowing action reserved for moments just like this.