After 14 years of living with metastatic breast cancer, I am now facing a new diagnosis—metastatic ovarian cancer.
My understanding of this journey—and of myself within it—has shifted.
Losing my hair during treatment in 2011 was the beginning of an indelible chapter in my life. Wrestling with metastatic breast cancer over the years, even the most haunting memories have softened and been absorbed into the past.
With time, life began to feel almost normal again—so much so that I sometimes have to remind myself that I am still living with a terminal illness.
Until April of this past year, when that sense of steadiness was interrupted by a second metastatic diagnosis.
The year 2024 held life moments I was not sure, fourteen years ago, I would ever see—especially my son’s beautiful fall wedding. Watching my sons grow into men, building lives of their own, has been one of the greatest gifts of this long journey.
The week before the wedding, my routine scans showed stable results and life felt steady. But shortly after, I found a small lump beneath my skin—a quiet reminder that scans do not always tell the whole story.
After years of similar discoveries, my doctors recommended a double mastectomy to prevent further complications. Given my long-term stability, my case had become somewhat unique—allowing for a surgery that is not typically considered in metastatic disease. Reconstruction was not an option, and I chose to move forward with surgery in January 2025.
I recovered well, surrounded by the steady support of [my husband] Jonathan, my sons, friends, and my sister-in-law, Michele.
Then, on April 11, 2025—exactly fourteen years from my original breast cancer diagnosis—my life shifted again with a diagnosis of metastatic ovarian cancer.
Just months earlier, in December, my scans had shown stability as I endured double mastectomy in January. But on April 11th, a year ago, everything changed. New scans revealed an aggressive ovarian cancer that had developed and spread rapidly in a matter of months. Given how closely I am monitored, we were able to catch it early enough to treat—for now.
Even after fourteen years of living with metastatic breast cancer, this felt like the beginning all over again.
Ovarian cancer unexpectedly burst into my life, testing all my bravery. Fighting MBC had become more of a taming-the-beast experience, something I had learned to live alongside. But ovarian cancer arrived differently—like a bull rampaging through a china shop—leaving me feeling fragile and shattered.
Giving myself grace became essential during a time of deep, intimate fear.
Unlike the sharp adrenaline of “fight or flight,” this was a quiet, constant fear—settling in like a heavy fog at the core of my being. Overwhelmed, all I could do was to allow faith to unfold and guide me.
My questionable faith became unquestionable.
The more I tried to push forward, as I always had, the more I realized I needed to pause—to center myself, to take a breath—and allow my body and spirit time. Time to heal from the physical and emotional toll of a five-hour surgery—a total hysterectomy and the removal of cancer throughout my abdomen and peritoneal lining.
While recovering and moving through the beginning phase of intense chemotherapy, I yearned for some relief from the ache in my body and spirit.
I stepped into a warm shower, the steam enveloping my cold skin, offering a brief moment of comfort. With my eyes closed, the water cascaded over my smooth chest and the tender nine-inch scar down my abdomen—a quiet reminder of what my body had endured.
When I opened my eyes, I caught my reflection in my husband’s fogged shaving mirror. Ghostly. Unfamiliar.
Tears welled as memories flooded back. The loss of my hair, the weight of the past, all rushing in at once—stealing the small sense of peace I had found.
I turned away from my reflection.
I felt a deep loss of all the parts of myself that had long defined me as a woman.
Questioning why I had to face another battle, the sense of comfort I had reached for dissolved just as quickly. In its place was a quiet, undeniable truth—I was still living with a terminal illness, and now facing a second one.
I stood there, wrapped in a cocoon of fear and uncertainty, holding on to a dim flicker of faith that still remained.
Can I emerge from this cocoon… again?
Cancer did not ask permission to become part of my life. It simply arrived—and stayed. It took center stage in my life, while fear and darkness move quietly around it—an invisible force I feel and live with every day.
Quiet in some moments, relentless in others. Always present.
I find myself facing a question I cannot answer—can I live a long life against two metastatic cancers with very low survival odds?
The honest answer is no.
But I can choose how I live within that uncertainty.
What I am learning is that my faith was never absent—I just did not always trust it. In the moments that matter most, it has always found me. And now, I am learning to trust my faith—and the strength within myself that it reveals.
Around my fifth year living with metastatic breast cancer, something shifted.
What had once felt like relying on hope alone—something that often left me feeling helpless—began to shift as new treatments emerged, offering time I had not expected. I found myself adapting, moving with each new development, learning how to live alongside the disease rather than simply bracing against it. Research was successfully prolonging my life one new drug therapy at a time.
Someone once said to me, “You are living with cancer, not dying from it.”
That idea stayed with me.
I began to see it differently—that as long as I was here, living, cancer was simply something existing alongside me. In a strange way, it felt almost like an unspoken understanding: if I am here, it is here. And so I kept living.
I began to see that what I once thought was faith was often me trying to quiet my own doubt.
In the cancer world, there is a constant message—be positive.
But I have never been entirely sure what that really means.
I have known deeply positive people who did not survive cancer.
So I found myself questioning—what is faith, and how do I recognize it when it is real?
Is it certainty? Or is it the willingness to believe even when certainty is not there?
A dear friend once told me, “Be careful, Cat. When you doubt, that is the devil whispering.” She was right from the perspective in doubting myself. But I have come to feel that doubting my faith does not separate me from my faith–it has been drawing me deeper into it in ways I did not fully recognize.
Survival rates speak loudly. They ask you to prepare for an ending you are not ready to accept.
There are moments when I feel the weight of that reality—the possibility of being separated from my family.
The awareness of being separated from my husband and children by death was a concept not even remotely possible within the depths of my being.
Even now, it is something my heart resists fully understanding.
Is that fear… or is it hope?
In those moments, it is their presence—their love—that steadies me.
I have come to believe that love itself is a form of faith.
And wherever there is love, you will find Him.
So where am I now?
I completed five months of intravenous chemotherapy, along with procedures to manage fluid buildup, and finished that phase of treatment in September. Now, I continue with daily oral maintenance chemotherapy, along with additional intravenous treatment. This will continue for the next two years, with ongoing scans and monitoring for both cancers. Long term, I will remain on treatment for my lifetime as I have been doing for the last 15 years.
My most recent scans show no active ovarian cancer, aside from a spot or two believed to be dead cells.
Even with that good news, I live with the understanding that ovarian cancer recurrence is 80%. So I continue—one step at a time.
There is no clear path forward, only the willingness to keep moving.
The love of my family.
The love that has surrounded me through every stage of this journey.
The love that has held steady, even when everything else feels uncertain.
Breast cancer introduced me to my faith.
Ovarian cancer has shown me that it was there all along.
I have been in that cocoon of fear, holding on to a dim flicker of faith.
And I am still emerging.
Not finished.
No bell to ring, ever.
Not certain.
But still here.
Still learning to trust.
Still choosing to live within what I have been given.
Fighting for a life filled with meaning, with love, and with whatever comes next.
Living in the quiet space between breaths.
Needing a miracle every day.
MBC—April 12, 2011
Metastatic Ovarian—April 11, 2025
