Nancy Jill's Cancer Alphabet: E

Day 5. The letter E. Elephant. It’s a cliche, to be sure, but metastatic breast cancer is the elephant in the room of the breast cancer community. No one wants to talk about it. Research is underfunded. Although 30% of early stage breast cancer patients who complete treatment and are declared cancer-free will develop metastatic disease, to most of them it’s a huge surprise. Perhaps their oncologist didn’t tell them the statistics about recurrence. Perhaps they never got scanned and were never staged accurately to begin with. The culture of breast cancer, the national discourse around breast cancer, has been to focus on early detection and cure. We have absolutely no idea why 30% of breast cancer patients can’t be cured. With increased research into genomics, and immunological and targeted therapies we might understand what makes the patients or the cancers of metastatic patients different. For that to happen we need to see the elephant and talk about it.