Sarah Hughes has written an excellent piece in The Guardian about what it’s like to live with Stage IV cancer during COVID times (including missing out as life ticks away, the challenges of accessing treatment, and fears about cancer research funding). It was great to see a mention for METUPUK in there:
This had never felt more pertinent than last month, when social media lit up with Breast Cancer Awareness memes and pink ribbons and talk of fighting and beating the disease. For those of us with stage IV cancer such messages seem beamed in from another planet. As the campaign group MetUpUK points out, 31 people die every day from metastatic breast cancer, and countless more of us live each day with a disease that has a median survival rate of two to three years – a rate that drops considerably if you have a cancer that began as a triple negative breast cancer, as mine did. Yet our stories, which might force people to face the uncomfortable truth that we are not “winning” the “fight”, are rarely told.
The thing about living with stage IV cancer is that it’s ever-present. You can be doing the most mundane of tasks – cooking dinner, chatting to your children or lying on the sofa reading a great book – and suddenly the unwelcome thought will pop into your mind: “Oh I have an incurable disease and one day it’s going to kill me.” These thoughts are at their strongest during situations such as the last lockdown and, now, the current one.
Read the full article.