Our MBC Life

Send us Fan Mail  Welcome to the  episode 4 of our Meditation Mondays series, created with MBC patients in mind. Being with the truth of whatever is here in this moment with compassion and without judgement and knowing that we're not any one thing because we are constantly changing, is at the heart of this practice.   Join us! As we say at the start of every meditation session, sit back and p...

Send us Fan Mail In today’s episode, Anne Woodward sits down with a special guest to discuss the in’s and outs of having MBC while living in the public eye. Get ready folks you are not going to want to miss hearing from Kelly Crump. She is the first ever sports illustrated swimsuit model photographed while posing on a picturesque beach in a gorgeous swimsuit with a mastectomy scar for all the worl...

Send us Fan Mail  Welcome to the Meditation Mondays series, created with MBC patients in mind and designed for people who want to assist their body's natural tendency to repair and heal. It's not a substitute for medical treatment, but a compliment to it. Inspired by a very enthusiastic response to monthly meditation sessions from one of SHARE’s MBC support groups, this episode is our th...

Send us Fan Mail Introducing OMBCL Shorts! This new feature of our podcast brings you memorable outtakes from the amazing interviews we do with people living with MBC and the many incredible people who support us. Our inaugural OMBCL Shorts features Dr. Stephanie Graff talking about what she does when someone is newly diagnosed with MBC. This season, we had a 3-part series for people newly diagnos...

Send us Fan Mail If you don't hear much about the rising rates of all stages of breast cancer, including MBC, in young women, you're not alone. De novo MBC rates (when Stage 4 MBC is found at the first diagnosis) are rising "exponentially", and fastest among women between the ages of 25 and 39, but not in older women. These trends are alarming to researchers. Perhaps most shock...

Send us Fan Mail In 2021, the estimated number of women in the United States living with metastatic breast cancer rose to about 168,000 from 155,000 the year before, according to the Breast Cancer Research Foundatio n. The good news is that survival rates are also climbing, Over the last 20 years, advances in HER2 targeting treatments, ADCs, immune checkpoint inhibitors, and CDK4/6 inhibitors have...

Send us Fan Mail Welcome to the Meditation Mondays series, created with MBC patients in mind and designed for people who want to assist their body's natural tendency to repair and heal. It's not a substitute for medical treatment, but a compliment to it. Inspired by a very enthusiastic response to monthly meditation sessions from one of SHARE’s MBC support groups, this episode is our sec...

Send us Fan Mail Living with metastatic breast cancer is hard enough, but for those who are single or do not have a primary caregiver, living alone with MBC can be especially challenging. Even if you're used to being independent, having cancer and going through treatment when you live alone raises many challenges.  Making space for all that you are feeling & managing the practical things...

Send us Fan Mail The first days, weeks, and months after being diagnosed with MBC can feel like you’ve been dropped into a dangerous and alien landscape, one whose inhabitants speak a new and confusing language. Numb and bewildered, you face a mountain of medical decisions—each of them seemingly high stakes. If that sounds all too familiar, take a deep breath. Our goal for this third episode in ou...

Send us Fan Mail Candid and emotional, this interview with Michelle Anderson-Benjamin, who was diagnosed first with early-stage breast cancer during the pandemic and then, soon after completing treatment, with metastatic breast cancer, brings our 3-episode series for those newly diagnosed with MBC into the realm of advocacy. Michelle shares her experiences as a health care professional who looked...

Send us Fan Mail Hearing the words “you have metastatic breast cancer” is devastating. Whether your diagnosis comes de novo or months, years, or even decades after treatment for early-stage breast cancer, there is no way to prepare for the terror, anger, despair, and sense of freefall that follows. It’s no wonder that the phrase “emotional rollercoaster” comes up so often when MBC patients describ...

Send us Fan Mail Welcome to the Meditation Mondays series, created with MBC patients in mind and designed for people who want to assist their body's natural tendency to repair and heal. It's not a substitute for medical treatment, but a compliment to it. More and more people find that using their minds in this way helps them relax, feel stronger. And it seems that when you take a more ac...

Send us Fan Mail A diagnosis of Stage IV Metastatic Breast Cancer is typically the (or one of the) most significant traumas a person and their loved ones will experience.  Rather than an immediate death sentence, strides in cancer medication and research means that many will live for years after receiving this terminal diagnosis. Thus, patients and their families may begin to wonder, "what do...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode of our Road To A Cure series, we talk with oncologist and researcher Dr. Erika Hamilton about the practice-changing developments of the past 15 months. This is a timely discussion as research continues to catch up to need in our lives with metastatic breast cancer.  2022 brought the big news that an anti-body drug conjugate, Enhertu, was delivering results in peopl...

Send us Fan Mail Our guest today is Jean Sachs, Chief Executive Officer of Living Beyond Breast Cancer, who’s overseen and grown the impact of LBBC for nearly three decades. She joined LBBC in 1996 as its first Executive Director and was named CEO in 2008. During that time, LBBC has become a national force in breast cancer patient support and action. Jean’s focus on inclusivity, whether by race, a...

Send us Fan Mail Inspired by a very enthusiastic response to monthly meditation sessions from one of Share’s MBC support groups, this episode kicks off our plan to post these recorded mediation sessions on the OMBCL website.  April Pichon, Oncology social worker at Houston Methodists Cancer Center, and Barbara Chutroo, long-time meditator and social worker, join OMBCL co-hosts Nancy Roylance, Vict...

Send us Fan Mail Breast cancer is no laughing matter, but that does not keep our guests in this episode from using and sharing humor to cope with their diagnosis.  For our first guest, NYC actress and comedian Jenny Saldaña, a life-changing diagnosis spurred her to write the play “Pink,” a dramedy that includes some of the more humorous moments of life with breast cancer.  Khevin Barnes, who lost...

Send us Fan Mail When it comes to metastatic breast cancer, clinical trials are the way we find new drugs, better therapeutic targets, and, hopefully, more time. There are many issues with how clinical trials are designed, who they recruit and who is excluded, but one of the most difficult to confront at least here in the US has been the failure of the entire system to address how Black women and...

Send us Fan Mail Welcome to the second part of our post–ASCO  analysis of the state of affairs in hormone receptor-positive MBC. It was not so long ago that the only options for this most common subset of breast cancer were single agent endocrine therapy and systemic chemo. We have come a long way over the last couple of decades. Today we are asking Drs. Stephanie Graff, Sara Hurvitz, and Kevin Ka...

Send us Fan Mail Cerianna is an FDA approved molecular imaging agent that has the ability to tell the doctor the receptor status of all the tumors—essentially creating a “whole-body" picture of estrogen receptor (ER) positive lesions in recurrent or metastatic breast cancer (MBC). The ability of physicians to more precisely “visualize” the disease may be instructive in determining the most ap...

Send us Fan Mail Not only is our Caregivers episode during National Family Caregiver Month, but it’s also our 100th episode! Join us as Our MBC Life salutes all the people in our lives whose love, care, friendship, compassion, humor and resilience brings comfort, meaning and joy into our days. In this episode, three of them share an intimate perspective on what’s it like to be a caregiver. First,...

Send us Fan Mail While the DESTINY-Breast04 trial, which earned a standing ovation as a practice-changing study for treatment of HER2-low MBC garnered most of the headlines from the ASCO (America Society of Clinical Oncologists) annual meeting in June, it was not the only reason for optimism.  In this episode, the first of a two-part series, Our MBC Life’s Victoria Goldberg and Lynda Weatherby con...

Send us Fan Mail ' We Remember' honors all  who died from metastatic breast cancer over the past year—parents, children, spouses and partners. It gives voice to both the grief and the love that endures after each death.  To live with a metastatic diagnosis or to be a caregiver, friend, or loved one of  someone with MBC is to inhabit a community of loss. Both demand that you confront and...

Send us Fan Mail The short answer to our title question is that you present a clinical trial that’s a game-changer for treating metastatic breast cancer. That’s what happened in June when Shanu Modi, MD, medical oncologist and attending physician at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, shared the results of the DESTINY-Breast04 trial at the American Society of Clinical Oncology meeting.  MSK’s...

Send us Fan Mail The biggest news out of the June meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) was the success of a relatively new drug called Enhertu (trastuzumab deruxtecan) in treating estrogen positive (ER+) and triple negative (TNBC) breast cancers that were also HER2 low. Results of the clinical trial presented at the meeting were so positive that in August the FDA approved th...