Recurrence stats

Alright, this is a post that has been in the making since March…Not sure why it has taken me this long. As we approach my 1 year mark with an MBC diagnosis I felt a need to revisit this topic. Continue to ask me questions when they come up; happy to answer them along the way.

I have been asked a few times if I knew that I was at risk of becoming metastatic. This is an interesting question because it comes from people within the cancer community as often as it does from those outside the cancer community. Because I understand stats pretty well and I am a firm believer in the phrase “knowledge is power” I knew my risk was higher post diagnosis 1, than before. But if I am completely honest, I didn’t really think it would happen to me right now, or in this way.

What I mean by that is that I thought I could have another tumor come up in my breast again, and that would be considered a local recurrence; not metastatic. I really didn’t think it would come rearing its ugly head in my sternum, bones, and lungs. I always knew that I could be the 1 in 3 early stagers that could turn metastatic, but I thought that more than likely it would come back as another small tumor in my breast years from now. I would rationalize by telling myself that there are women with way more risk factors than me that have a much higher chance of recurrence.

Let me take you on a little trip down memory lane, back to 2016. I had Stage I hormone+ IDC with no family history and no known risk factors. At that time I was a healthy 31-year old that had started menstruating late, had children by the time I was 30, breastfed them both for a total of 35 months, wasn’t overweight, exercised more than the average person, didn’t smoke, ate a healthy diet, and only had a few drinks a week.

In the U.S. 1 in 8 women will be diagnosed with breast cancer in their lifetime. When we lived in Eugene I had a core group of friends that totaled about 10 women. If you do the math at least one of us would get breast cancer in our lifetime. In 2014 a good friend of mine from that group was diagnosed with breast cancer and when I was diagnosed in 2016 she said “dammit, I thought I had taken one for the team.” Unfortunately for us, that’s not how stats work and yet our brains try to make sense like that.

When I was going through radiation, during my first diagnosis, I remember telling my mentor and friend that it feels like cancer returning to my body was a matter of WHEN not IF. She responded the way any good mentor does which was with a that’s not necessarily true. Her own story included a Stage I diagnosis with no family history or risk factors and a reoccurrence YEARS later, and her reoccurrence wasn’t metastatic. She was living proof that it could come back but it didn’t have to be a death sentence. This is what I pictured for myself too.

When I first felt the tumor on my sternum in the summer of 2018 I didn’t think mets. I kept telling myself, nope not me, this is a regional recurrence, something contained to this area in my chest, no where else. Sometimes denial or compartmentalizing is what we do to deal. It was my coping mechanism because sometimes stats don’t tell my story the way I think they should.

So did I know it could happen to me? Yes, I was acutely aware that it could happen to me. Cancer clearly had it’s own plan and didn’t consult with me though, because here I am 3.5 years out from my first diagnosis still playing with numbers and wondering which stats will apply to me and which won’t.