Mindfully Living with Metastatic Breast Cancer

“We take care of the future by taking care of the present.”

~Jon Kabat Zinn

I want to address my decision to live mindfully as a way of managing my metastatic breast cancer;  what that looks like and why I am making that choice.

First of all, what does mindful living look like?  In a nutshell, it means taking care of your actions, your words (both internal and external) and your feelings to assist you in living a good and present life.  Everyone’s interpretation of how the nuts and bolts of their mindful living is expressed will be different.  We may be in the same storm but each of our boats are designed and built differently.

For me, as a post-menopausal woman with metastatic, hormone positive breast cancer, what does my mindful living look like?  In short, everyday begins with reflection and a commitment to actively manage my health.  This means paying attention to my nutrition, my thoughts/emotions, my activities, my relationships, my stamina and my stress levels.  Not only am I paying attention to these things, but I am also assessing how each of these areas are impacting one another.

Some people may look at this plan and think, “why is she so obsessed with all of this? She certainly doesn’t have time to enjoy her life.”  But all of these things are now just part of my routine, they have been prioritized and they allow me to more fully enjoy my life.  For many of these things I have found ways to seamlessly incorporate them into my life with little disruption.

This leads to the question of why I am making these choices for myself.  For instance, I have had people question why I am continuing to test my ketones on a daily basis.  After 19 months of doing a therapeutic keto nutrition/lifestyle plan, with stable/optimal ketosis what’s the point?  The driving force behind this decision is the fact that my cancer is metastatic;  it has spread beyond the breast and lymph nodes into multiple areas of my spine, ribs and pelvis.  Though, at present, there is little evidence of “active” cancer in my body that doesn’t mean it is gone/never to return.

For several years I was a Neurofeedback practitioner.  In the neuroscience field there is a famous saying, ‘what fires together, wires together.’  In terms of neuroplasticity (the brains ability to be resilient and build new pathways), this is a cornerstone to brain health.  

Cancer uses a similar approach in order to survive and proliferate in the body.  It hijacks metabolic pathways and changes their nature to make the environment more hospitable for the cancer cells to thrive.  By living mindfully I have changed many of those metabolic pathways to be much less hospitable for the cancer cells.  But does this mean they will never find a way around the metabolic changes I’ve made?  That answer is unknown.  Do I want to take a chance that the cancer will not find a work-around to the new metabolic pathways I’ve established?  The answer to that is a resounding, ‘NO!’  

I understand that as a woman in my 60s with metastatic breast cancer, the statistics for my longevity are not in my favor.  The gold-standard statistic for someone in my situation says my life-expectancy from diagnosis is 19-30 months.  I am already 19 months into that statistical range.  One of the driving forces for me in living mindfully, is to rewrite those statistics.