“The body follows the mind:” Living long-term with metastatic breast cancer

Born in Newfoundland, Canada, Myra first came to the U.S. at age 17 to visit her sister, who was spending a summer in Florida. When she arrived in Miami to a 75-degree day, she decided she had found her new home.

When she formally emigrated a few years later, Myra was following her intuition toward this practiced, intentional mindset. The year she gained dual citizenship, 1986, tested this mindset, as her celebration was quickly followed later that year with a diagnosis of early-stage breast cancer at 42 years old.

Family history lesson

“I had no idea breast cancer was so prevalent in my family until I was diagnosed myself,” Myra recalls. After telling her mother the news, she learned that her mother’s sister had died of metastatic breast cancer and that her maternal grandmother had had ovarian cancer.

In the 1980s, particularly with family roots in a rural part of eastern Canada, these family stories that would raise awareness of breast cancer weren’t shared.

But this knowledge, as well as urging from her surgeon and inspiration from former First Lady Betty Ford’s choice to be public with her mastectomy decision, empowered Myra to openly share her breast cancer journey.

She also followed her surgeon’s suggestion to get reconstructive surgery — with a bonus eyelid surgery that not only provided tissue for her reconstruction but corrected the heavy eyelids that ran in her family.

“I got two for the price of one,” Myra says. “It sounds weird, but breast cancer to me has always had a brighter side.”

Although her treatment plan didn’t originally include chemotherapy because no cancer was found in her lymph nodes, a few months after her surgery, she found a lump in her armpit.

Leaning again on her intuition, she saw her surgeon right away. She underwent 30 rounds of radiation and chemotherapy, which looked quite different than it does now. Rather than an IV drip, the chemotherapy drugs were manually pushed in with a syringe over a half-hour period. Preparing herself for the potential of hair loss turned out to be a moot point because she ended up not losing her hair at that time.

“I’ve always felt that of course, sometimes things are negative, and that’s life,” Myra says. “Even though I wouldn’t wish breast cancer on my worst enemy, you have to look for the good side.”

A season of grief

Thirteen years later, she would put her positive mindset to the test. She became caregiver to her husband, who became sick with pulmonary fibrosis decades after working with asbestos as a young man.

While he was in hospice in 2002, she noticed swelling in her lymph nodes. One evening, they shared dinner in his hospice room. They spent time laughing and recounting a lifetime of memories, travel, and time spent together.

The next morning, she visited him on her way to have a biopsy on her swollen lymph nodes. The hospice staff let her know he had declined overnight, and Myra decided not to share the details of her doctor’s visit.

By the time she returned from the appointment later that afternoon, he was unconscious and actively dying. He would not hear the news her surgeon brought her in the waiting area: Her biopsy was positive for metastatic breast cancer.

Within a few days, her husband had passed. Myra had lots of decisions to make. In that moment, she knew taking care of his funeral arrangements in the short term would allow her to take the time she needed to process her metastatic diagnosis.

“You got all these bumps in the road,” Myra says. “Now you have to decide which one you can get over first and which one is most important. And at that time it was my husband.”

She continued to make her treatment plans, and once she got through the logistics of putting her husband to rest, she found space for herself.

Focusing her attention on her husband’s funeral arrangement “helped me get through the grieving process,” Myra says. When she received some of his ashes in a silver cross from the funeral home one Sunday afternoon, she let all her feelings come out.

“Everything that I had pushed down, I let come up and come out. I cried and I screamed, and I just sat there,” Myra says. “After it was over, it was like I had taken a cleansing breath. And I knew, now I have to move on to the cancer.”

Lighting the way for others

After learning her new diagnosis was positive for the HER2 receptor, she was started on the drug Herceptin, which had received FDA approval only a few years before in 1998.

Myra calls Herceptin as a “miracle drug” that for the past 23 years has kept her metastatic disease from progressing. She has been fortunate to tolerate the drug well with infusions every three weeks.

“I’m very thankful. I realize how lucky I am,” Myra says.

As much as she credits her medical team and treatment, Myra also believes that her intentional choice to look for positives through the pain has carried her through the challenges of life with metastatic breast cancer.

“I never believed I was going to die from this,” Myra says. “MBC, while devastating, has taught me to appreciate every day and everyone around me.”

Within the last year, she established care with a new oncologist after her previous doctor retired. At their first visit, he could not conceal his amazement at her success on her current regimen of Herceptin with a hefty dose of positive thinking.

“Even when I had my first diagnosis, I knew I was going to live to be an older woman,” Myra recalls. “And if you get over it, when you survive, share that, because there’s somebody coming behind you that needs to hear that, and needs to see you.”