METAvivors

When I was at the conference in Philly, I picked up a car magnet from METAvivors, a charible organization for women with metastatic cancer. I finally got around to visiting their website at http://metavivor.org/index.html.


Here's an excerpt from an essay by one of their founding members.

We ask that the public understand that the 110+ Americans dying every day from breast cancer [I don't know the Canadian stats] are not dying because they were not vigilant or were not courageous enough, and they are not dying because their will to live wasn’t strong enough. To the contrary, it takes tremendous courage and the strongest of wills to face this diagnosis squarely, to wear a smile on your face and move forward with your life while wondering what tomorrow’s test will reveal, how your body will react to the next series of treatments and/or clinical trials ... never knowing when your oncologist will tell you he has run out of options or your body will not tolerate any more drugs, and hoping against hope that there will be a medical breakthrough before that time arrives. No … these people are not dying because they were somehow inadequate to the task, they are dying for the simple reason that the lack of research has kept this disease un-survivable.