Hope after a metastatic diagnosis

by Sarah Diesburg

It was a cold day on March 6th, 2020. I was teaching two classes that day as a professor at the University of Northern Iowa, and I was trying to squeeze a well-needed hair appointment into my busy schedule. I was also entering the third trimester of my second pregnancy.

That’s when I had the seizure – the first sign that my early-stage breast cancer, treated almost five years ago, had returned, and spread to my brain. Later, after giving birth to a healthy baby girl, I was diagnosed with stage 4 metastatic triple negative breast cancer at the age of 37.

A metastatic diagnosis means that cancer has spread beyond where it was originally diagnosed, and it is truly a terrifying place to be. We found my cancer had spread to three small places in my brain, lung, and chest lymph node. Average life expectancy of someone with the triple negative metastatic breast cancer subtype ranged around 2-3 years.

I had a newborn baby and a toddler at home, as well as a loving husband. I couldn’t leave them. I started on a newly approved combination of chemotherapy and immunotherapy as soon as I recovered from brain surgery to remove the tumor from my brain. I also started reading everything I could about this disease, and I made a vow to myself to do everything I possibly could to stay alive. I ate a healthier diet. I started exercising a lot. I worked on my stress, even though that seemed ridiculous at the time.

As I write this article, I’m coming up on my two-year anniversary of that fateful date. And, amazingly, I have no evidence of disease (NED), which means cancer cannot be identified on current scans. I am one of the small handful of people with solid tumors for which immunotherapy, along with targeted radiation, has been able to keep me in NED status. For the last 16 months, I have been on maintenance immunotherapy alone, which luckily for me has no side effects.

Immunotherapy is so new in this space that my doctors do not know how long my NED status is likely to last, but they are getting cautiously optimistic that it could last a very long time. Maybe even a very long time. I’m also not stopping any of the healthy habits I picked up along the way to help support my body and immune system.

I wish I could send this article back to myself two years ago. I searched those first few dark months after being diagnosed stage 4, and I found very few stories of hope. I’m still here, and I’m full of hope and determination for a long and hap

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