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So It's October

Writer's picture: Praneeta VaidyaPraneeta Vaidya

Trigger warning I will be discussing Breast cancer in this post and going into details about my personal fight with it and noting some information about Breast Cancer. This is by no means meant to be medical advice in any form, just my personal experiences. My aim with this post is to bring awareness and share my story with the hopes that it helps someone who is either going through this themselves or is a caregiver in some form.

As some of you might know I have a love hate relationship with October. I was diagnosed with Stage 4 De Novo, which means right from the beginning, Triple positive ie. Hormone; Estrogen and Progesterone, and hER2 (a protein) positive, IDC ( Invasive Ductal Carcinoma), Breast Cancer in April of 2020, when I was 37. No family history, and even though I never treated my body like a temple, I didn't treat it like a rollercoaster either.

While stage 0-3 gets a lot of coverage and there's a lot of information floting around about it , people's perception of Stage 4 or MBC ( Metastatic Breast Cancer) is really lacking. There isn't a tonne of research being done on long term MBC survivors, granted it hasn't been very long since people have been able to live for extended periods of time with MBC. When I was diagnosed my best friend was with me and she couldn't help herself but she googled the survival rate and it was something like 21% make it past 5 years. I'm 4.5 years in and have been cancer free for a year. Hurray for science!!!

A lot of people are familiar with early stage cancer where someone will go though number of rounds of chemotherapy and/or radiation and then get scanned once every three months to check if it's back or not , but esentially they get to stop treatment, but when your'e diagnosed MBC, you will be on some form of treatment for the rest of your life, or at least that is the protocol right now. You stay on treatment until it stops working or you can't take it anymore then you either take a break or switch to another medication. I am very lucky that I have Hormone positive breast cancer, since there are many options for me, when it comes to treatment, but on the other hand more than 50% of people who are hER2+ end up with brain metastases.

If you have ever vistied a chemo suite you might notice a bell outside the main room. People who choose too can ring the bell to indicate that they finished their last round of chemo. I'm not a fan of the bell, it's a constant reminder that I will never be able to ring that bell . I don't think I would feel so bad if I wasn't diagnosed De Novo. At my Cancer Center even the radiation department has its own Gong that people can hit when they finish radiation.


A lot of people are unaware that MBC has its own ribbon too.

I started Adorn two years after my diagnosis. Terrified, unsure of everything but at the same time had this blind confidence that I was going to make this work. I did not want to get a "traditioal" job and I tired getting into the art scene here but becuse of some of the side effects and long term nerve damage I got from some of my other chemo's I couldn't get into producing art like I used to. So starting Adorn gave me the best of both worlds I still get to be creative and make things with my hands but I get to do it on my terms and timeline. It has been quite a learning experience since I had never done anything like this before, I mean I taught English as a second language for 11 years and helped run a non profit art gallery curating shows and doing markets with my art work.

I'm sure I'll make another post about this before the month is done as I have scans coming up and I've been on a break from treatment since August. First time I have Scananxiety.


Thank you again for getting this far and your support.

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