Debbra advised other women with breast cancer to pay attention to persistent signs and symptoms after treatment.
Transcript
There’s limited resources, there’s no support group here at all for metastatic patients. There’s limited understanding and I belong to the Saskatchewan Breast Cancer Connect so these are a whole bunch of survivors and what I found is that it’s pretty scary for a group of women who are breast cancer survivors then for one of us to flip and become… I was really concerned for the group because one of my biggest fears was for my cancer to come back and so I wasn’t sure how the group would manage that. And it is a scary thing and we’ve had some honest conversations and that’s one of their biggest fears and so again these group of women who have been through it the first time, you get different reactions with them as well. Some of them can’t handle the fact that, and I’m one of the youngest ones in the group right now, and so here I am, I think I was very vital and energetic and stuff like that and to be hit again and… so I found that I pulled away from them because I didn’t want to scare them and I didn’t want them to be hit in the face of what could be facing them.
The Canadian Breast Cancer Network had pushed and done some advocacy to make, I think it’s October 13th metastatic breast cancer awareness month, or day I should say. Because that’s the other thing, you go through as a metastatic patient, you go through and hear all these things about survivorship and it’s just… it’s really… everything is about these women who are dealing with their process but they’re… they have hope and stuff like that. And sometimes you feel like you don’t fit in and there’s no place for you because you’re, “Do I classify myself as a survivor or am I going to be…I’m not going to be a survivor because we know that this is going to take my life but where do I fit in? What part do I attach to?” And so that, I think is something that needs to be truly looked at.
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