Elizabeth Edwards remains a hero in the metastatic community. She gave a face, her face, to metastatic breast cancer. She let the world know that she was living with a terminal diagnosis.
Mrs. Edwards lived three years and nine months with this disease. Some of us get lucky and respond well to the bag of treatments and live six, eight or, amazingly, more years; but eventually all treatments stop working for everyone with a metastatic diagnosis.
One woman dies of metastatic breast cancer every 14 minutes in the United States, and no one knows how to stop the metastatic cells from spreading once the process has begun.
While we all want a cure, what we need now is for researchers to focus on how to stop metastasis once it has begun, thus taking the fear out of a breast cancer diagnosis and making Stage 4 breast cancer a truly chronic disease.
Ellen Moskowitz
President
Metastatic Breast Cancer Network
New York, Dec. 8, 2010