2.Metastatic breast cancer is terminal.
转移性乳腺癌无法治愈，并且是终末。“One thing I didn’t know when I was first diagnosed is that breast cancer can only kill you if you have metastatic breast cancer,” says Rosen, who explains that if your cancer remains in the breast, the tumor can be removed, but metastatic means it has spread outside the breast.
“MBC is almost like a different disease than early-stage breast cancer,” adds Ann Silberman, 60, from Sacramento, California, who was diagnosed in 2009. “We are going to die. Our concerns are much different from those of a person who has a treatment that will be over [one day]. Someone in an earlier stage may worry about losing their hair — which is understandable — but they will return to their normal life at some point.”
People with metastatic breast cancer expect to be on treatment for the rest of their lives. “I don’t think everyone understands that,” Silberman says. “I still get, ‘When will your treatment be over?’ Well, it’s never going to be over.”
3.您可能不知道我病了。
“I may look perfectly healthy, but I’m sick,” says Silberman. “Treatment is hard. I sleep a lot. I still travel, but it’s difficult. I just visited a friend in Utah for four days, and it wore me out for two weeks.”
Just because someone doesn’tlook就像她患有晚期癌症一样，她可能病得很重。“这可能是一种看不见的疾病，”西尔伯曼说。“你告诉某人你患有癌症，但是如果你有头发，有时他们不相信你。”
4.计划必须灵活。
“我的精力是不可预测的，”塞勒巴赫说。“从字面上看，我永远都不知道从一天到另一天的感觉。制定计划非常困难，因为如果我对两周的时间说“是”，那天，我会醒来并感到绝对可怕。”
当患有转移性乳腺癌的人在最后一分钟降低了邀请或取消邀请时，很可能不是因为他们不想在那里。Sendelbach说：“我们身体上做不到。”
Silberman agrees. “I’ve been going through [treatment] for a long time,” she says, “and I’ve had friends drop away. Because of MBC and my treatments, it’s hard for me to be reliable.”
5.我必须确定优先级，并尽量不要流汗小东西。
对于Sendelbach，每个星期都从她的优先事项列表开始。她说：“显然，去我的医生的约会非常重要。”“但是，如果衣服没有折叠，那是可怕的情况吗？绝对不！”
Sendelbach has learned to make compromises: If her husband and son have to pick up their clean clothes from the couch, she can live with that.
“I have learned,” she says, “to look at every situation and ask if this is going to truly make a difference in my day or my family’s day for better or worse.” If the answer is no, then that task might be left undone.
不过，对于Sendelbach来说，这并不总是这样。当她第一次被诊断出患有癌症时，她的儿子只有一岁，她已经结婚了两年半。“你知道当你第一次生孩子时的情况 - 如果一切都不完美，那感觉就像]世界正在崩溃！”她笑了。“现在，对我们来说 - 我们吃了，我们还活着，房子是可以接受的 - 如果我们很好，那一切都可以。”
6. There are good days and bad days.
“There are days when I say to myself, ‘I’ve had enough. I can’t take it anymore,’” says Rosen. “But I want to keep on living. I love my life. Overall, I have a great life except for the cancer.”
Rosen has a few mantras she uses when things get tough. “A lot of the tough times are treatment related,” she says. “I refer to those as bumps in the road, and [say to myself], ‘This too shall pass.’”
7. Clinical trials are a promising treatment option.
For people with advanced stages of cancer, clinical trials can be considered thegold standardof treatment. “I recommend clinical trials highly,” says Rosen. “You get access to medication and treatment that you normally wouldn’t have.”
临床试验甚至可以对您的癌症产生积极的效果。“我们生活在一个激动人心的时刻癌症治疗,” says Kimmick. “There are myriad new drugs coming out that will improve the lives of all women with breast cancer, both metastatic and early stage.”
However, it’s important to be realistic about the potential outcome of your trial. Rosen was recently enrolled in a clinical trial in which the medication proved toxic for her. But she has no regrets about participating. “It feels like I’m helping researchers who are working on cures for cancer,” she says. “When I had a bad reaction to the drug, they were able to put my side effects in their study. I feel like I did help, and that makes me happy.”
有兴趣加入临床试验治疗的人应与医生讨论可能对他们有益的选择。
8. I may not feel like a “fighter” — there’s no final victory.
用来描述癌症及其治疗的语言通常是战争的语言：与癌症作斗争，与癌症作斗争，成为战士。但是这些话可能不会引起转移性乳腺癌的女性的共鸣。
Sendelbach首次被诊断出患有1期乳腺癌时使用战斗单词召回。她说：“我30岁，我处于战斗模式。”“我当时想，‘是的，我可以踢癌症的屁股’等等。”不过，当她被诊断出患有第4阶段时，她意识到没有尽头，没有最终的胜利。
“There’s not a finish line,” she says, “so to be in fight mode doesn’t really work. There has to be an end in sight to stay in that place.”
For her, metastatic breast cancer is something she deals with day to day. She describes her journey as a marathon, not a sprint. “If you have to stop sometimes to walk and take water breaks,” she says, “you should. If you try to run as fast as you can all the time, it’s inevitable that you’re going to fail.”
9. Our advice to other women with metastatic breast cancer: Be nice to yourself!
“休息一下！”是Sendelbach提供的建议。她说：“停止对您应该做的事情但没有做的事情进行负面自我交谈。”“如果您有MBC，则需要对自己友善和爱。”
The body has only so much energy to offer per day, and managing metastatic breast cancer requires a lot of it. So it doesn’t make sense to try to compare what you’re able to do with what your cancer-free friends are accomplishing.
“Just getting through the day can be hard,” Sendelbach says. “Getting rid of those ‘not good enough’ feelings can lift a huge weight off you.”
