I started the Breast Cancer Awareness month with a post and a blog and I am going to end Breast Cancer Awareness with a post and a blog!

It has been an interesting month. Of course, people have a tendency to share more about their own stories during this month, myself included. Some of these people share a lot in general, raising awareness, and sharing their highs and their lows.

I have noticed over the years that in general there tends to be a trend of how people react and share their stories. In the beginning, once the initial shock of a diagnosis has been digested and the patient understands more about their illness and their treatment plan, they go into total warrior mode. It’s exactly what I did.

Once I had completed almost 6 months of chemotherapy and got married (in a wig, still fuming about that) I found myself in hospital over my 40th birthday for a single mastectomy after a lumpectomy didn’t show clear margins. Since I was having an immediate reconstruction and knew I would almost certainly not be able to wear my bras with wires, I started my search for non-wired bras and all I could find were ugly and practical bras. That is not what I wanted at all.

After a long and deep search, I found a brand in Australia and the wonderful survivor who had created the brand for the same reasons I was searching for them sent me a bra to try for free, a relationship was born and it was the beginning of Simply Zoë. I wanted to help other women like me. Cue my warrior stage. What can I do to help others!!!

Shortly after that FEARLESS. was born, in partnership with my best friend, with the sole intention of raising money for cancer charities and associations, continuing the warrior phase.

Then I noticed the next stage, where a lot of people share their treatment plans, show themselves receiving their treatments and share results. I’m not one of these people as a rule and this is why. There’s an element of being quite shy and private in the public domain (my friends and family would scoff at that, but they know me differently), an element of not being terribly creative and I think the content is much more interesting when it looks really good, and mainly for me, it comes down to not wanting to put myself through the response that highs and lows tend to receive.

Once after I had quite a lot of progression last year, I had a never-ending stream of messages from well-intentioned people who literally thought I was at death’s door. Metastatic disease is a tricky one but it can be very treatable. Fast forward to now, if you have read my last blog, the treatment I started in April has so far been very efficient, so much so, that I found out yesterday from a blood test that my cancer markers have dropped even further to 23! This basically means I’m in the normal range. This is an amazing result that we did share, but I’m in a very different place to last year, where all those responses honestly made me feel very low and scared. My husband and I made a decision after that, that for the most part, we would only share the news with family and close friends for the most part. The highs and the lows are significant with an incurable illness. When things aren’t going well, I feel bad enough as it is but similarly, when results are good, people forget about the illness.

I like to call my illness in its current state (and long may it continue) an invisible illness. I look fine. It’s impossible to tell I receive chemotherapy every 21 days. But there is a 7-day period each time where I feel terrible after treatment and overall, my energy levels, fatigue, and chemo brain are more or less constant. I am often overwhelmed by simple tasks and cannot function anywhere close to how I did until the end of 2014.

Lots of people tend to stay in the share the journey stage. I’m not really in that club. I share bits and pieces depending on where I am with treatments and results and how I feel overall. Cancer is a part of my everyday life and if I let it, it exhausts me. It’s part of who I am but it doesn’t define me and I don’t want it to be the main thing people know about me or how I lead my life. I have been living with an incurable illness since January 2015 for which I have been on constant treatment, whether it be chemo, radiotherapy, radio-frequency, or hormone therapy, and will continue to be on constant treatment, even though I am currently presenting little or possibly no disease unless a cure is found.

Happy Life!

Being happy even with an incurable illness is such a blessing!

And it is for that reason I focus now primarily on FEARLESS. It is vital that funds are raised to support research to find that elusive cure. And we shouldn’t only focus on it for one month a year, it should be constant. Metastatic breast cancer is the only breast cancer that kills and I wish very much for that to change. It’s also a great distraction for me with no major pressure. When I feel like working on it, I do. It’s a great way to keep my brain busy and it’s a fulfilling hobby, and also, it is a lot of fun working on FEARLESS. with my bestie!

So, we will continue in our efforts to raise money for research with FEARLESS. You can read about who we currently support here and we would love to hear from you if there are other Swiss-based charities that you would like us to support or be aware of.

If you missed my last blog explaining where I currently am in treatment, click here.

End of Breast Cancer Awareness Month 2023